Thousands of pickups don’t need thousands of Actors. By building a coin pickup system with plain data arrays rather than one Actor per coin, we can add thousands of pickups to the world in microseconds, not milliseconds. The code remains simple to understand and maintain. We store each coin’s location, credit reward, and mesh instance ID in three synchronized arrays. A single Instanced Static Mesh Component represents the coins in the world. This layout, known as a Structure of Arrays, is one way to apply Data-Oriented Design to your gameplay systems. It lets us process thousands of pickups with less memory overhead and is more cache friendly than using Actors and Components, which is important for performance. During the lessons in the new UE5 C++ Course we go into detail on how and when to apply this in your own projects. Data-oriented Design is nothing new and Unreal Engine has a similar data-oriented system called Mass. But I often see developers learn this approach very late in the process as Unreal Engine is so heavily biased to OOP (object oriented programming). OOP is convenient, but not always the right approach. In the C++ course we explain and apply both.

What began as a simple UE5 upgrade, turned into a year-long rebuild. I’m proud of the result and grateful for all the support on the original course. The Anniversary Sale ends in a few hours (23:59 UTC), save $100 using “FIVEYEARS” and get the upcoming multiplayer module free.

Five years ago today, I launched my Unreal Engine C++ course. Today, the completely rebuilt UE5 edition is LIVE! With 30+ hours of newly recorded lessons, redesigned code and gameplay systems, and a new curriculum. Existing C++ students get it for FREE! tomlooman.com/courses/unreal…

Unreal Engine 5.8 performance highlights article is live! Focusing on the most interesting changes affecting performance, profiling, and optimization. New features for profiling with Unreal Insights, tons of shader permutations improvements, and many useful new CVARs and changes that a buried in the full release notes. Find all highlights below: tomlooman.com/unreal-engine-…

I just released a 1 hour long GPU profiling and optimization video using a Far Far West, an Unreal Engine 5 indie game that just entered Early Access! We run this on an RTX 3060 to get meaningful numbers for the “lower end” PC specs.