Unreal Engine’s built-in Blueprint system is very easy to use and understand. Even people that aren’t experienced coders can use it to write their own shaders and effects. In combination with the Unreal Editor it is the perfect means for prototyping and tweaking. Currently the random generation of the environment – meaning sky, lighting, planets and other background objects – is down via Blueprints that just need a seed for the random generator to work. Although the engine is far from complete it just gets better and better with each update and the team absolutely loves working with it. It’s a good thing we have NVIDIA PhysX integrated in UE4. It can easily be tweaked within the editor. Saves us a lot of time so we can focus on other things.

Optimizing

Optimization is very important, especially since we not only want to support various machines but also support VR, which requires a much higher frame rate. There’s also the PS4 and Xbox One versions that we have as a stretch goal. Unreal Engine thankfully offers a lot of console commands that make the hunt for performance killers a lot easier. As the game code constantly changes and evolves, these performance tests have to be done on a regular basis.

Working With VR