Seems to make the app smoother the more models we had. Rendering the UI (not downloading the code, this is still part of the bundle) only when you need it seems to be a low hanging fruit for optimizing performance.
Any time a library in your code goes from being used by a couple people to used by everyone, you have to periodically audit it from then on.
A set of libraries on our code had hit 20% of response time through years of accretion. A couple months to cut that in half, no architectural or cache changes. Just about the largest and definitely the most cost effective initiative we completed on that team.
Looking at flame charts is only step one. You also need to look at invocation counts, for things that seem to be getting called far more often than they should be. Profiling tools frequently (dare I say consistently) misattribute costs of functions due to pressures on the CPU subsystems. And most of the times I’ve found optimizations that were substantially larger improvements than expected, it’s been from cumulative call count, not run time.
This is one scenario where IMGUI approaches have a small win, even if it's by accident - since GUI elements are constructed on demand in immediate mode, invisible/unused elements won't have tooltip setup run, and the tooltip setup code will probably only run for the control that's showing a tooltip.
(Depending on your IMGUI API you might be setting tooltip text in advance as a constant on every visible control, but that's probably a lot fewer than 38000 controls, I'd hope.)
It's interesting that every control previously had its own dedicated tooltip component, instead of having all controls share a single system wide tooltip. I'm curious why they designed it that way.
Kinda annoying that the article doesn't really answer the core question, which is how much time was saved in the start up time. It does give a 0.05ms per tooltip figure, so I guess multiplied by 38000 gives ~2s saved, which is not too bad.
I once made the mistake to buy some sound effects from Fab, I had to download the entire Unreal Engine and start it to create a project to then import the assets..
It took the whole afternoon
It's no wonder UE5 games have the reputation of being poorly optimized, you need an insane machine only just to run the editor..
State of the art graphics pipeline, but webdev level of bloat when it comes to software.. I'd even argue electron is a smoother experience tan Unreal Engine Editor
Hmm, so what exactly is stored in that gigabyte of tooltips? Even 100,000 tooltips per language should take maybe a few tens of megabytes of space. How many localizations does the editor have?
From a purely technical perspective, UE is an absolute monster. It's not even remotely in the same league as Unity, Godot, etc. when it comes to iteration difficulty and tooling.
I struggle with UE over others for any project that doesn't demand an HDRP equivalent and nanometric mesh resolution. Unity isn't exactly a walk in the park either but the iteration speed tends to be much higher if you aren't a AAA wizard with an entire army at your disposal. I've never once had a UE project on my machine that made me feel I was on a happy path.
Godot and Unity are like cheating by comparison. ~Instant play mode and trivial debugging experience makes a huge difference for solo and small teams. Any experienced .NET developer can become productive on a Unity project in <1 day with reasonable mentorship. The best strategy I had for UE was to just use blueprints, but this is really bad at source control and code review time.
I have worked full time for five years with a combination of Unreal and Unity. I've also worked for five years with Frostbite and another five in various custom engines.
I absolutely love both Unreal and Unity. Unreal is amazing from a technical perspective and having worked with a talented team in Unreal the stuff we were able to make were mind-blowing given the resources we had.
Unity is way easier to work with if you aren't focused on high fidelity graphics. In fact, I've never tried any engine that felt as easy to work with as Unity. I would absolutely not call it a monster. Even with a fairly green team you can hit the ground running and get really productive with Unity.
This was originally submitted with the title "Speeding up Unreal Editor launch by not spawning 38000 tooltips", a much closer match to the actual title of the post, "Speeding up the Unreal Editor launch by ... not spawning 38000 tooltips".
Why has it been changed? The number of tooltips improves the title and is accurate to the post.
I recently decided the fastest way to work with Unreal is to throw it out and go with something else. It's like 10 fucking minutes to compile an empty project.
I like Godot primarily because of GDScript; you are not compiling anything so iteration time is greatly reduced.
Unigine is also worth a mention. It has all the modern features you could want like double precision, global illumination etc but without the bloat and complexity. It's easy to use as much or as little of the engine as you need; in every project you write the main() function. Similar license options to Unity/Unreal.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] threadSimilarly, adding a modal like this
{isOpen && <Modal isOpen={isOpen} onClose={onClose} />}
instead of
<Modal isOpen={isOpen} onClose={onClose} />
Seems to make the app smoother the more models we had. Rendering the UI (not downloading the code, this is still part of the bundle) only when you need it seems to be a low hanging fruit for optimizing performance.
A set of libraries on our code had hit 20% of response time through years of accretion. A couple months to cut that in half, no architectural or cache changes. Just about the largest and definitely the most cost effective initiative we completed on that team.
Looking at flame charts is only step one. You also need to look at invocation counts, for things that seem to be getting called far more often than they should be. Profiling tools frequently (dare I say consistently) misattribute costs of functions due to pressures on the CPU subsystems. And most of the times I’ve found optimizations that were substantially larger improvements than expected, it’s been from cumulative call count, not run time.
(Depending on your IMGUI API you might be setting tooltip text in advance as a constant on every visible control, but that's probably a lot fewer than 38000 controls, I'd hope.)
It's interesting that every control previously had its own dedicated tooltip component, instead of having all controls share a single system wide tooltip. I'm curious why they designed it that way.
It took the whole afternoon
It's no wonder UE5 games have the reputation of being poorly optimized, you need an insane machine only just to run the editor..
State of the art graphics pipeline, but webdev level of bloat when it comes to software.. I'd even argue electron is a smoother experience tan Unreal Engine Editor
Insanity
I struggle with UE over others for any project that doesn't demand an HDRP equivalent and nanometric mesh resolution. Unity isn't exactly a walk in the park either but the iteration speed tends to be much higher if you aren't a AAA wizard with an entire army at your disposal. I've never once had a UE project on my machine that made me feel I was on a happy path.
Godot and Unity are like cheating by comparison. ~Instant play mode and trivial debugging experience makes a huge difference for solo and small teams. Any experienced .NET developer can become productive on a Unity project in <1 day with reasonable mentorship. The best strategy I had for UE was to just use blueprints, but this is really bad at source control and code review time.
I absolutely love both Unreal and Unity. Unreal is amazing from a technical perspective and having worked with a talented team in Unreal the stuff we were able to make were mind-blowing given the resources we had.
Unity is way easier to work with if you aren't focused on high fidelity graphics. In fact, I've never tried any engine that felt as easy to work with as Unity. I would absolutely not call it a monster. Even with a fairly green team you can hit the ground running and get really productive with Unity.
I'm also always surprised we don't see more games on the current gen id software engines
Why has it been changed? The number of tooltips improves the title and is accurate to the post.
I like Godot primarily because of GDScript; you are not compiling anything so iteration time is greatly reduced. Unigine is also worth a mention. It has all the modern features you could want like double precision, global illumination etc but without the bloat and complexity. It's easy to use as much or as little of the engine as you need; in every project you write the main() function. Similar license options to Unity/Unreal.