WHAT
This week on Inside Unreal, Ben Zeigler will walk us through how to use the Asset Manager to efficiently categorize, load, and ship large amounts of data. We’ll explain the origin and purpose of the system, followed up by an in-editor tour of how Action RPG use the Asset Manager - including Blueprint nodes for Asynchronous Loading. We’ll also dive into an in-editor example of how to use the Asset Manager tools to investigate a packaged build, plus a code-focused section where we’ll discuss different ways to extend Asset Manager for a game.
WHEN
Thursday, February 11 @ 2:00PM ET - Countdown
Hey everyone, I’m working on the agenda for this right now. So if anyone has any questions/areas of interest related to the Asset Manager that they would like to know about, feel free to post them here and I’ll see if I can cover them as part of the stream. Looking forward to it!
So my main focus (and why I suggested this stream), is how and when to decide to load assets, how bundles work, i.e Say in menus I only want to load the basics of a Weapon Definition (which is a data asset about a specific weapon), and when to load things like FX for in games (ideally also when using Gameplay Cues as I assume Fortnite probably does not hard reference particles in Cues, are these loaded async when needed?). What optimal places should you load/unload assets without causing issues. Are weapon meshes for example just loaded async at the time they needed or are they loaded as a bundle?
Asset Manager is build on Asset Registry.
In projects I work on I treat Asset Registry as database to query quite a bit of meta data, without loading assets.
Now, was that intended usage, or I stretch it to far by treating it as database ?
Looking forward to this topic! It would great if you could talk about how AssetManager would be utilized in a project with DLC content and/or user mods?
To let everyone know in case folk missed the live stream or wanted to check back on some information presenting in the stream- the video is now live on Youtube.
Now that the video is up, I also wrote up a quick article on the Community Wiki with the examples I used in the video so it’s easier to copy. I hope the video was helpful!
Does async loading(with soft references, etc) operate at the package level?
I have a blueprint that creates some generated textures within its same package. Will loading the blueprint automatically pull in the textures simply by being in the same package? Or can these textures still be soft referenced and loaded/unloaded on demand?
