A GPD Win post!

Hi!

This month we've taught horses to follow paths, made a character creation system and also put together some complex interactive materials. All that in Unreal 4. Too bad we can't show any of this right now, because it's for our current job. In any case, we're learning a lot working full-time in Unreal 4!

There's a thing we only briefly mentioned in our previous post but didn't elaborate on it: the GPD Win that Lussy created the rhythm game project with, using Unreal 4.

The GPD Win is advertised as a portable Windows 10 PC, and Geril bought one about 3 months ago. At first he considered getting a LattePanda, but figured it would be too much trouble to make it stable. (Since, funnily enough, Geril bought it for work, stability is a huge concern)

Even though our GPD is for work, we still use it to play some games: we play World of Warcraft on it using random public Wi-Fi hotspots; Fallout: New Vegas and various indie games. For example, Cuphead runs with a stable 60fps.

To play any "serious" modern games on it, we need to do some heavy work and tweaking just to get it running in a bearable manner, so we don't do it very often. It's just too much effort, but it's just about what we expected.

But as for Unreal 4, we had no clue how it would run. It's a huge relief that it runs well, surprisingly well. Of course everything that can be set to low has to be set to low, and everything takes a really long time to load and compile.

At first, Geril created simple materials, material instances, particle effects and levels. Editing materials is fine, but compiling shaders is a problem - probably because the built-in storage is really slow. It also gets very hot when compiling shaders (and even the maximum fan speed doesn't help), so we actually had to leave it in the fridge for an hour to complete compiling about 5000 shaders. Well, at least anyone who opened the fridge had a laugh.

The framerate immediately drops in the editor when working with any lights in the scene. Funnily enough, playing in editor produces better framerates than not starting the scene at all.

What really works well on it though are blueprints. Last month's practice project was created almost entirely on the GPD, and apart from the controls (using blueprints with analog sticks...), there wasn't much to complain about.

We could talk about what's actually in the GPD, but we think it's irrelevant - it's basically a 64 bit PC, and Windows PCs are known for their customization options, therefore any issues can ultimately be solved. We were positively surprised how agile the Unreal Engine is, and how much work can be done using such a tiny machine.

So we can work even on the go! Yay... I guess?

With that said, Happy Halloween! (The Halloween spirit evaded us this year)