Chaos Destruction Demo in Unreal Engine 5

Hi everyone,
I stumbled into problems running the Chaos Destruction Demo in Unreal Engine 5 Early Access. To be fair, in the Learn-Tab it only displays UE 4.23 to 4.26 to be compatible with it. However, I managed to get it working under UE5 and wanted to share my little journey in case anyone else stumbles into the same problems.

In case I missed something (maybe there even is a dedicated UE5 version of the demo?), please feel free to link me to that!

Tutorial on how to load and run the Chaos Destruction Demo in UE5 EA:

  • In the launcher, switch to the Learn-Tab and download the Chaos Destruction Demo
  • A new project with the same name should be created. Right click and click on “Go to Folder”
  • In the explorer, right-click on the .uproject file and open with notepad (or similar) and delete the “MeshEditor”-plugin entry.
  • Then, right-click on the .uproject file and click on “Switch engine version”
  • Chose UE5EA. This will end up with an error, which you simply dismiss.
  • Right-click the .uproject file again and click on “Create visual studio files”. This will also end up with an error which you also dismiss.
  • Then go into the Source folder and open both .cs files.
  • Here you need to delete or comment out the PhysX, APEX, Cloth, QueryStructure and BuildEnviroment variables. It should look like this:
// Copyright Epic Games, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

using UnrealBuildTool;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class ChaosDestructionDemoEditorTarget : TargetRules
{
	public ChaosDestructionDemoEditorTarget(TargetInfo Target) : base(Target)
	{
		Type = TargetType.Editor;

		ExtraModuleNames.AddRange( new string[] { "ChaosDestructionDemo" } );

		bCompileChaos = true;
		bUseChaos = true;
		//bCompilePhysX = true;
		//bCompileAPEX = true;
		//bCompileNvCloth = true;
		//bCustomSceneQueryStructure = true;
		//BuildEnvironment = TargetBuildEnvironment.Unique;
	}
}
  • Open the project in Visual Studio (or Rider for Unreal) and recompile.
  • Once that is done, open the .uproject file and it should work.

Hope this helps anyone. :slight_smile:

Greetings
Chriz

12 Likes

That was really helpful. I got the demo up and running really quickly

1 Like

Hi, I am very new to ue5, can I have the project files, I couldn’t get this to work…thx :slight_smile:

Hi @Dovah_Niik, could you tell me, at what step you have problems and what the respective error-message reads? It is possible, that I missed something and in that case I would like to add this to the guide to make the life easier for other users.

Greetings

A thanks for this. Worked perfectly.

Holy â– â– â– â– , actually a guide to something that works. Thanks a ton for this.

I think some people on this thread and probably more in the future might be getting confused as this still requires you to download the project from git and compile with vs studio community .

You cannot get this working just with the epic launcher and UE5 as far as I know anyway.

You deserve a medal. Pretty weird to mark this project as “legacy” and basically abandon it, when it takes so little to keep it working with the current editor version.

… not to mention that figuring out what it takes, exactly, can amout to a lot of work in trial and error.

Could you please provide link? I’am interested