Improving Bomb Efficiency - Keith Babcock

This week a lot of my time was spent converting Unreal Blueprints to C++ and figuring out how to gradually transform our blueprint only team project into a C++ blueprint hybrid. The first step of this has been converting our interfaces to C++ and reimplementing them into the blueprints to give our upcoming C++ classes the ability to interact with our already established blueprint classes.

One of the improvements I wanted to make during this process was converting my support ability payload from blueprint into C++ to improve its efficiency as when we were profiling the game a large amount of strain on the network was coming from using the strafing run support ability where at its worst it added the equivalent strain to an additional player being in the game. To fix this, I refactored the code to use less server calls and I removed the replication of payload movement across the server, because it was already redundant as I send the flight path for each payload from the server to the client already. This cut the strain of these support abilities by over 70% when I profiled the network again.

Additional improvements to the game included adding the artillery precision strike support ability and the resupply support ability, the resupply wound up taking me quadruple the amount of time I had expected as I hadn't taken into account the difficulty of converting all the different interfaces between blueprints into C++ that were required to allow the pickups to interface with the player state.