- Progress Report! -

Greetings Everyone!
After two months of silence, it's time to give a progress report!

First of all let me start by thanking all my Subscribers who have been giving their money monthly which has increased up to 330$ total per month!

Whether you are someone;
- Who is supporting right now,
- Who supported before but can't anymore,
- Who can't support now but hopefully later,

Know that you are all precious to me and I am working daily on UF2D thanks to you!

Now let's get down the business
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So what are the news?

For around 2 months I have been refactoring the code. As we are getting close to a public Alpha release, something had been bothering me for a while;

Why is this Project asking for 6 GB Ram in startup and taking 2.5 minutes to open up?!

At first I thought this was normal for a big project. However it also became unstable, code compiling taking ages and worst of all, crashes. Since we are all waiting for 4.26.1 release of Unreal Engine for reasons I will mention soon enough, I thought it was time to change... literally everything.
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What did the Code Refactoring change?

Since the refactoring broke every single code in the Framework, I was not able to start up it as Game for 2 months to test the results so it was not something I could show you people as it went on. But now here is the fruit of the labor!

Old UF2D   = Startup Time: 2 Minutes 35 Seconds (Holy Hell I know!)
New UF2D = Startup Time: 15 Seconds ( Now THIS is much better.)

Old UF2D = Startup RAM Requirement: 6 GB
New UF2D = Startup RAM Requirement: 1.5 GB

Next images will be about showing the proof of how RAM usage is improved! RAM Requirement was REALLY bothering me because in the end I wanted people who had 8 GB RAM to be able to use UF2D too. While 16 GB RAM is the general minimum requirement for any Game Development, I am still happy with the results! I hope you are too!

Old Silly UF2D...

New Clever UF2D! ^-^

Of course all these updates also changed the compile time for the code, especially the deep core files. For example "Character Core", which holds many information for Characters compile time reduced from 15 seconds to 3 seconds! However this value can change as I add more stuff but it is an improvement nonetheless!

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Couldn't we get an Alpha Release with 4.25 Unreal Engine instead of 4.26?

There are a few good reasons or that, it's a long list so read if you are interested.

1 - FR(Framework) is taking way too long to open up and asking for asking 6 GB RAM, which makes it impossible for someone to open it if they got 8GB RAM. This needs to be addressed as a 1.5GB project shouldn't ask for such amount.

2 - FR is crashing in weird cases sometimes such as when you want to throw a Fighter etc. Some assets are causing corruption in project in time, causing Unreal to crash after a while working on them. These only started to occur after I upgraded the FR from 4.24 to 4.25 Unreal, which brings us to the 4th reason below.

3 - 4.25 version of Unreal is at the moment known as the most problematic version of Unreal due to the massive changes they made internally. 4.26 aims to fix most of it all.

4 - While an Alpha version released now could be tolerated for crashes, long load times and whatnot, this might also create negative prejudice which I rather not have especially if I know I can fix those issues.

5 - Hitbox, Guardbox System that is essential for Fighting Games is not in 4.25 because the programmer I had before did a really bad job. My new programmer made a much better system but only for 4.26.

6 - 4.26 has a terrible performance issue regarding the 2D assets just because of a Boolean being On, which is meant to constantly store data to send to Epic Games. They toggle this Boolean in test phases of an upcoming version than toggle it off when the major release happens. Unfortunately they forgot this for 2D which I reported myself for them to fix at next version of 4.26, aka 4.26.1.

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What will be happening from now on?

I will be working on fixing the bugs that is surely be around after the refactoring so I might still be silent for a while. There are still things to adjust and change after all.

My mission: Code all these stuff so you don't have to.
Your mission is: S U R V I V E

Failure is not an option. Take care! ^-^

PS: Join Discord if you didn't yet. https://discord.gg/GqTuXxP