Building for optimization from the start

[ClockworkOcean]

@AntiGravity

Yikes, that seems like something of a perfectionist creativity killing approach. But whatever works for you dude…
I’d argue that you’re at risk of killing off some pretty serendipitous moments in terms of gameplay discovery tho.
UE4 (and even UDK) has immense capacity for high mesh counts, without devs having to actually do too much.
Overall landscapes + foliage, plus high AI player / character counts + navmesh complexity are the bigger issue.

BTW:
UE Livestreams + GDC talks are far more useful for learning about optimisation than the docs will ever be imo.

+1…

I’ve no doubt that the devs who’ve mastered all the profiling and stat commands are the best in the business tbh.
But there’s still something to be said with just having switches to toggle the action on / off within complex scenes.
Or move the action quickly to a test level so you can see if the foreground / background complexity is killing FPS.

BTW:
The cumulative build up of collision in complex scenes, can cause huge issues that stat-unit won’t ever show you.

Of course there is a place for the tools, but you can do 90% of it just with fps and knowing what to look for…