Mass Entity 5.8 preview

Development Programming & Scripting
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I’m taking a look at the Mass Entity framework major overhaul features announced in the 5.8 roadmap and I have a few questions:

  • If I understood correctly, these improvements are not yet included in 5.8 preview? (for example I don’t see the announced MassCore module)
  • I’m also curious about the GIF shown in the mass roadmap, is that a new mass sample project you are developing alongside the framework overhaul? We’ve been lacking documentation and gameplay examples for quite some time now.
  • Do you know if there are any efforts on the team to make Mass Entity listen server compatible- add QoL features for listen server? (I’ve noticed that Mass Crowd Replication is heavily geared towards dedicated server model)

Thank you so much!

-Antonio

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Steps to Reproduce

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The chunk processing queue change should be included in 5.8 preview. I do not remember if the CVar for using it is enabled by default in the preview as we have been fixing some bugs since the preview went live. The CVar for enabling it is mass.UseProcessingQueue. You can toggle it on to use the new chunk processing queue which our tests have shown to be faster on high core count devices. Some of the changes have not been included yet such as Mass replication with Iris which is still being worked on.

The GIF contents are from a talk that Jared Schibel will be giving at Unreal Fest Chicago. I believe the plan is for the talk to be available online after the event if you are unable to attend. We do have plans for more talks and Epic Dev Community articles around Mass. Those should hopefully be coming later this year with some examples of both how we design for Mass and code various game style features. I plan to have some smaller articles as well about using Mass with other Unreal Engine tech such as an MVVM UI that is populated from Mass fragment data and selecting Mass entities in a game level by a player.

I am not aware of any listen server specific issues with Mass. Can you share some more of what you have encountered? It is possible we have not accounted for them, but I can give some advice on how to approach solving them.

-James