Hello! So been going at this for about 4 days now.
I want to be able to place at least 2000 units following a path.
In Mass they do have a path. So the path is not the problem. The problem is getting more than 1000 units without frame drops.
The units are just cubes. they don’t need avoidance or any fancy traits. I’m just curious if anyone has found ways that don’t involve movement components. Just actors.
I’ve found that under the crowd visualization trait you can switch out your bp class with a static mesh and that helps alot upon getting closer. But just curious if someone has found a way to incorporate something like niagara. Or other things like that to help it with performance.
Cause i feel like I should be able to make way more units/cubes whatever than just 1000.
I also get huge lag spikes. I assume its all the cubes spawning in and i try checking on unreal insights but for 5.5 something changed and i can’t read that now either
I also know that its still under development and experimental…for the last 3 years. So things are changing alot and quickly. However I’ve seen unity’s DOTS be able to do 10s of thousands. I feel like it might be me though. And also so little info on mass i’m just lost. Unreal doesn’t even explain what each trait does! Help?!
Hey there @AnimalAce! I don’t have experience with MASS but if it’s just an SM, the instancing MASS does should be enough to handle a couple thousand without issue. There could be other factors at play. However you can also give Niagara a shot if you just need basic movement, here’s some resources that can help you get the Niagara setup rolling:
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OMG a reply! Thank you!
So i’ve seen the first 2 and have skimmed around them a little. They are very good and i might end up going with one of them. What i need though is to be able to switch to a blueprint actor very quickly which mass does. In the first 2 videos they don’t really show that.
However thank you for showing me that third video! I’m watching it now and it already gave me an idea on how to keep my static mesh similar to when i switch to the bp actor.
So just to reiterate. I was more looking for how to combine niagara effectively with mass. But these videos are very helpful none the less! Cheers!
If I remember correctly, technically the first video does actually (very lightly) touch on replacing particle instances with functional actors, but it’s very minimal. What you learn from the other videos should help you with getting the crowds working, and with a little Niagara Scratch Pad and elbow grease replacing the particles should be possible, though I don’t have any resources for that specific matter because there’s not many resources for scratch pad in general.
Though you aren’t alone in the endeavour and other users are also working towards the same goals:
Hey, I found the best method or one good method very same and used by bend studios in days gone.
First, they used animations sharing but not on all. So basically, they made clusters of zombie like 10 or 20 in a pool. And the one lead will be sharing animation to that pool and same for other. Also, these zombies are very seperate actors with less AI complex like dumb they just sleep, wake and attack/chase. So that’s how they were able to do the mass crowd simulations. And i think, this applies to all like you just need to do basic animation.
But there is an alternative if anyone is Rendering expert, UE does it’s skeletal mesh on CPU and there is no way to do instance skeletal mesh same as static actors. So if anyone can do this, it’ll be great.
