I'm resetting Project Boon.
Since last year I've been stuck because UE4 is an engine dedicated to 3D games and I chose to use Paper2D which is UE4's system to manage 2D sprites and animations.
This was all well and good at the beginning but after a while I started to face some limits that forced me to work in a hacky way.
I was allways fighting the engine and the logic was sustained by hacks and workarounds.
The "right" way would have been making plugins to add the functionality Paper2D lacks and I needed.
But the REAL right way would have been using skeletal meshes, animation blueprints and leveraging all the tools the engine has out of the box...
So this is what I'm doing from now on, I'll scrap Paper2D and all the hacks using Timelines and all that sh*t and switch to skeletal/static meshes, billboard materials, animation blueprints with state machines, montages and animation notifies...
I feel stupid, frustrated and pissed because I chose the wrong path and lost a lot of time doing so but at least I can reuse most of the logic already written so it's not that tragic.
So this video is to show what a difference already makes the change.
In the latest project version I have with Paper2D I have a map with 1000 actors with the basic Paper2D material and Flipbook Characters and I could barelly get 28 fps.
Now, using regular quads with billboard materials and the default Postprocess effects and such I can get 40+ fps with more than 10000 actors!
And the best part is that, when I transfer the rest I will be able to finally have multiplayer functioning because I won't have to deal with weird replication problems I had before.
Let's see if I can finish the switch before the month ends.