Where the other case studies were limited to non-gameplay or simpler sample content, this opportunity is very exciting. We get to show a released game that is in ongoing development and currently in Early Access.

This brings incredible opportunities for showcasing optimizations alongside real world complexities such as optimizing a game that's already being played and being developed with a small team and limited resources.

What is The Forever Winter?

"The Forever Winter is a tactical shooter where you and your squad must loot the dead to survive under the shadow of terrifying and gargantuan war machines locked in a never-ending conflict."

The game features multiplayer co-op with up 4 players and an ambient war between squads of enemy AI. This makes it a perfect real world example of performance optimizations as it touches many complex problems such as networking, tons of animated characters, ongoing combat even without the player's involvement, high-end graphical ambitions that need to scale down to low end hardware, and the list keeps going...

See Steam Page for details

Which optimizations topics can you expect?

While the exact list is subject to change, there are a lot of pretty exciting optimizations that should be highly relevant to many of your UE5 titles as well!

• Optimizing SceneComponent movement performance when you have 1000s of movables in your world.
• Using Significance Manager in production environment to throttle the AI squads without the player noticing.
• Optimizing Blueprints and converting specific sections to C++ backed by profiling analysis.
• Graphical optimizations for Nanite, Lumen, Virtual Shadow Mapping etc.
• Specific C++ optimizations for CPU cache and memory.
• Finding and fixing frame pacing issues caused by game code and other sources.
• Analyzing Unreal Insights to find the biggest impacts.
  

Many of these optimizations have already been applied to the game and can currently be seen in the live game on Steam. The recordings of these have yet to be completed.