For the past few years I’ve been developing in Unreal Engine, I’ve always had this question is there anything better than ‘Event tick’ that isn’t performance-draining used in excess,
I don’t think it should be used in excess, is there any better way to do stuff similar to an “Event tick” but not waste so many resources on performance.
Yes lots of systems run on ‘Event Tick’ but throughout the years I’ve noticed if used in excess it starts slowing down the project heavily.
I’m still trying to improve on my UE skills and such, So I may be here frequently to answer questions and ask them when needed, I’m usually a fast learner but sometimes I’ll get stuck somewhere in the process, and I’m trying my best to improve myself the best I can, I’d consider myself an intermediate in UE5. but I have made games on other Game Engines before and I am not new to Game Development, I’ve programmed in languages such as C# and C++, and Blueprints. (C# for Unity)
This is nothing really that important I’d guess, but I don’t want my games to run like garbage. and What are the best performance-saving techniques in UE5.
Although reading and watching videos has always helped me learn since I was young.
This post is a lengthy one, But I wanted to get everything out there. and I should probably end it off here before it gets too long, but I appreciate any answers, and guidance on everything I’ve said and talked about above.
Hello. Tick is very helpful and easy to use, but as you said it shouldn’t be used in excess. Also Tick can be optimized, for example an actor could be set to tick every 0.05/0.1/0.2 seconds depending on your needs.
There are many other tools that let you do similar things:
-Timers (probably the best tool in most cases)
-Timelines - usually used for animating an event by logic, for example smooth opening doors, moving a switch, smooth color transition, etc.
-Looping with delay - not very recommended but I use them when waiting until something is synchronized
-Probably there are many other custom ways.
I’d say, learn Timers and Timelines and you will be able to tackle most cases. And use Tick only for things that are really happening during the whole Actor’s lifetime.
I don’t think replacing tick with a timer in bunch of actors would bring any real performance.
What you can do is make sure that tick is disabled on actors that don’t need it (it’s enabled by default when you create new bp).
Use timers if running logic every frame is not required.
If you have bunch of simple actors that basically do the same thing, instead of each and every ticking on it’s own you can have a ‘manager’ that keeps their refs in array and updates them on own tick instead.