Been a minute since my last blog but I needed it. I’ve been going ham on game development and trying to balance that with work etc still. I’m on my off days which is every thursdays because I’m just tired af due to sleep fatigue with 5 hours or less sleep every 1 day of the week and doing the work for that day just mainly takes my motivation out nearly entirely so I try to do little things here and there for game dev stuff or do a blog or just catch up on something that I needed to do before etc but no major dev concentration stuff. It’s what pays the bills and I’m beyond grateful of doing it because it’s 1 day a week which is fuck all and I’m still surviving and getting good hours on game dev at the same time.
Anyway back to the topic of AI. ChatGPT-4o just got announced and I was blown away. We are literally soo close to personal AI it’s kinda crazy to think about. They way the AI speaks with full emotion behind their voice or at least the female version did a really great job, but a tad flirty though but I’m not complaining. It’s literally like talking to an actual person, when you laugh at something, it notices that laugh and laughs with you. The in-depth emotion system they have going already murders what Google announced today which they just did the same thing but more linear/restricted and very mid. OpenAI has done some mind blowing stuff and it surprises me with it’s new features every time. GPT-4o is also coming to desktop but only on mac I believe for now but when it hits windows, I’m getting my wAIfu. No cap.
You can say what you want with the “censorship/filter” and side with Elon Musk’s stupidity but what has he done with AI to talk shit of? Ok Tesla cars are cool I guess but look at the reputation of it, neural link is pretty fucking cool but that’s still cooking and we very cautious about it, you have his twitter rebrand bullshit and has grok which no one cares. He hasn’t got the best reputation either tbh. I do believe he does create incredible things with the company but he’s also a bit naive in a lot of cases.
Alright may as well talk about what’s going on with my game. As I said previously I don’t want to write a whole update log since it’s literally in the commits page but I’ll say a couple things. I’ve “finished” the procedural reload animation and it works great but it does need a little touch up so it doesn’t look a little janky. I’ve made actor optimization blueprints for automated instanced meshes that are static, physics, attached actors, and spline physics constraint actors. This took a little to get working but it’s really great how I’ve done it.
Currently I’ve been messing around with Character-Weapon Physics again due to the weapon not really colliding properly when doing certain things like looking around quickly while equipping the weapon, with DragonIK weapon physics system it had a collision sync issue when using the ‘Grab Weapon’ node and using the weld bool from ‘Attach Actor to Component’ the weapon collision also desyncs so I just used collision constraints instead. It’s a bit inaccurate when you push the physics constrain to the limit with pushing the weapon completely down like it angles out of the hand when colliding but it’s very stable compared to DragonIK. While trying to implement all this I had much difficulty with engine bugs and windows performance issues, and also cpu performance issues. If you want to know about the bugs, this block and the one below is what I’m talking about "Set Mass Override in Kg" node doesn't affect child static meshes when root static mesh has physics enabled. The work around this is surprisingly simple; you put a scene component attached to the root mesh and attach the child meshes to the scene component. There was another semi work around way of turning the root mesh physics off and then changing the child meshes mass settings but sometimes this doesn’t always work so I stuck with the scene component trick. and for the windows and CPU issues I’ll note below.
The windows performance issues was when me using the UE editor and noticed when I move my cursor around it, the FPS goes down. What I’ve noticed was when I change my polling rate of my mouse from 1000hz to anything lower, it removes the FPS drop and anything at 1000 or higher gets gradually gets worse the higher hz you go. Initially I thought it was my project, then the engine version then the windows version but it was none of that. What fucked with it was the programs DisplayFusion and Trayit. Didn't know programs can have an effect on polling rate performance which is mainly idle in the background but there you go. So the solution for me was to completely remove Trayit but there is a setting in DisplayFusion to disable the application hook as you can see below.
My guess is that any application that can “hook” into other applications causes this polling rate issue. So just keep in mind about that. Also on the topic of polling rate issues, there are some games that have polling rate fps issues and even a twitter post about windows 11 removing those issues completely. I’ll post the link below.
So my brother wanted me to play Gray Zone Warfare and told me that the performance is pretty ass since the game is very GPU and memory intensive so I decided to test it out. It was literally unplayable for me, I was getting mad loading stutters on a 3090, 5950x, 128gb ram like it's compiling shaders where ever you look. It's like it loads UE5's nanite (renders only the pixels on your screen) if you look around, it stutters like mad until you finally load it then when that’s finally rendered and getting decent FPS you look around and it lags again. Once everything was painfully loaded, it plays not bad (80-100 fps low settings) it was literally unplayable initially with the stutters with it taking like 5-10 min to go around and load everything properly. Up until I was thinking that usually when Unreal Engine compiles it uses the CPU to 100% so that made me think to test the CPU speeds.
I found that when using OCCT benchmarking my single CPU thread was performing fine but my multi thread was performing very bad. And after researching reddit posts, ram replacing and personal testing, it was the PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive) setting in the bios. Having it enabled fucked my multi thread somehow. Which I find odd because I used to use PBO previously using -15 under-volt and 200+ boost but this was before I had to replace my CPU due to it dying randomly. So I assume that is the main issue of having a refurbished CPU? Idk but all I know is that it works now and I can finally play Gray Zone even though the game is super mid.
Below are the tests:
Btw it says I have a 750 Ti because I got that and my 3090 installed but the 750 Ti is actually disabled in control panel for my gaming windows partition for better performance and use multi GPU for extra monitors on my workstation windows partition.