I am currently architecting a massive-scale simulation framework in UE5 and wanted to discuss bypassing traditional ECS limitations.
To achieve absolute hardware performance, I’ve moved away from standard UObject/Blueprint architectures and traditional ECS plugins (like Mass), as I found that ECS still inherently relies on “Entities” wrapping “Components”.
Instead, I am building a custom C++ Headless DataStream Architecture (HDA) that runs entirely outside the Game Thread. It utilizes pure Structure of Arrays (SOA) memory alignment, lock-free multithreading across all available CPU cores, and Intel’s ISPC for AVX-512 hardware vectorization.
I want to ask the community: why has no one bothered to attempt this? Why are we settling for the standard Blueprint/UObject bottleneck when an architecture like this could truly open Unreal Engine up to massive-scale RTS games, City Simulators, thousands-of-units Flight Simulators, and even commercial applications such as engineering CFD simulators? Has anyone else gone this deep into ISPC and lock-free multithreading within UE5, and what were your biggest hurdles?