I was excited to try out chaos destruction. I played around with it for a bit and figured I’d share my experience. For reference I’m an experienced developer, but completely new to C++ / unreal / 3d game engines.
I compiled release and failed. Then compiled release with chaos demo in the folder (why would compiling the engine depend on the demo… not a good sign), then finally using instruction (exactly except using VS2019). Thanks ! Compiles fine, demo works, but not excellently. Caching example was “under construction.”
Pieces slide about the ground. Lots of shaking / vibrating (particularly on some of the marble columns). Oddly adding a sleep field seemed to make the fidgeting worse.
Using in my own maps, I found creating geometry collections, fracturing, clustering, damage levels pretty easy and good looking. I’m getting excited. I quickly found that the performance hit for using chaos was very heavy. Dropped down to 1-2 FPS when I imported the example building. Quite possibly I’m making some sort of stupid mistake here, and I haven’t done any optimizing, but this seems like it would take a ton of optimization and manual tuning to do something like the video demo – and there was probably a lot of “cheating” in rigging the buildings for that exact sequence even if it wasn’t prerendered.
It crashes the engine intermittently if you try to interact with the chaos enabled objects.
If using “separate process” preview or compiled package the chaos objects were invisible (on the demo map as well as on my own maps). Don’t know why – they were set to visible, and were visible in the “play in viewport” and other modes.
On one map Chaos objects fell through ground – not sure why.
Haven’t tried integrating niagra, or caching.
I’m leaning towards dropping it, but if anyone has had good success or fixes let me know.