Relocating to Kraków · Open to hybrid/remote Senior Unity roles · 2-month notice

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Krzysztof Pławski
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Rescuing a legacy UE4 project

Restoring an old, undocumented Unreal Engine 4 VR project — builds from 8 hours to 1.5, GPU load down 60%, and a smooth 90 fps.

Client work · described generically, without client names or footage

The challenge

During my industrial placement year at SeedVR I took on an old, undocumented Unreal Engine 4 project: an asymmetric VR incident-commander training application for fire services across the UK. One user worked on a computer and the other wore a PC-tethered headset, first an Oculus CV1, later an Oculus Rift S and the original Oculus Quest.

It had started life as a student project, and the job was to turn it into a viable commercial product. Builds took 8 hours.

My approach

  • Build time. The editor was throwing 200–300 errors during the build. Tackling every one of them is what brought the build time down.
  • Performance. I used UE4’s performance overlays and profilers to narrow the weak performance down to the GPU. Digging further revealed a few very expensive shaders and some graphics settings, which became the places to fix.

Outcome

  • Build times went from 8 hours to 1.5 hours.
  • The project ran at a smooth 90 fps.
  • GPU load dropped by 60%, while visual fidelity improved.

During the same placement I built a bespoke VR training application in Unreal Engine 4 / C++ and several VR/AR prototypes in Unity/C#.

What I learned

Reviving an old student project and turning it into a viable commercial product is a great way to get into software engineering. Nothing beats being thrown in at the deep end.