How do you stop designers from putting logic on Tick in every Blueprint?
Bartek Wójcik@bartek_gamedev
No, so. New project, Unreal 5, small team (6 programmers, 9 designers). Designers are great, they build fast. Problem: every Blueprint they make has Event Tick with something on it. Checking distance to player. Rotating a coin. Updating UI text every frame. We have 400+ actors in the level, game thread is 19 ms on target, and I measured 6 ms of it is Blueprint Tick.
I tried:
- Talking about it in the meeting. Worked for one week.
- A "no Tick" wiki page. Nobody read it.
- Replacing some with timers myself. Next day new ones appear.
How do other studios handle this? Code review for Blueprints? Some tool that lists ticking actors? Or I just accept my fate and profile every Friday? Szczerze, I am tired.
Top answer
In my old AAA studio we had a commandlet in CI that listed every Blueprint with a non-empty Event Tick and posted the list in the designers' channel every morning. Public shame works better than a wiki, I am sorry to say. We also set bCanEverTick false by default in the base Blueprint classes designers inherit from, so they had to turn it on explicitly.
Get the best of #pixels-and-polygons weekly
One email each Monday with the most useful posts. No spam; unsubscribe in one click.
Comments
Sign in to join the conversation.
Sign in to commentOlivier Gagnon@ogagnon
In my old AAA studio we had a commandlet in CI that listed every Blueprint with a non-empty Event Tick and posted the list in the designers' channel every morning. Public shame works better than a wiki, I am sorry to say. We also set bCanEverTick false by default in the base Blueprint classes designers inherit from, so they had to turn it on explicitly.
Bartek Wójcik@bartek_gamedev
default off in the base class is very smart, why I did not think of it. and the morning list is evil, I love it
Jake Morrison@jakemakesgames
unity side but same problem mate. what worked for us was giving designers a component that does the common stuff (rotate, bob up and down, face the player) with a manager that updates them all in one loop. they just add the component. they dont want Tick, they want the coin to spin lol
Bartek Wójcik@bartek_gamedev
yes, this is true. they don't love Tick, Tick is just the first node in the tutorial. give them a better first node
Ondřej Hrubý@rewrite_it_in_rust
in Bevy this is a system with a query filter, designer cannot accidentally make every entity tick 🦀
Bartek Wójcik@bartek_gamedev
Please tell me how 9 designers make content in Bevy with no editor. I wait, again.
佐藤はるか Haruka@nekomata_games
same in Godot for my solo game, but I am the designer and the programmer so I can only shout at myself (´・ω・`) jake's manager-for-common-behaviours idea is good, I will steal it
Bartek Wójcik@bartek_gamedev
Then they give me a 200 page document and I implement every coin rotation in C++. No thank you Frank.