Any news on the continuations? Coming from web programming and C# (where we already have both chained promises and the awesome async-await), it feels incredibly hard and time-consuming to implement asynchronous and optionally-parallel computations in UE4. We’re in C++, though, and I understand how hard it most certainly is to implement such a thing so that it works on at least most platforms consistently.
Question - I understand it’s not desirable and safe to change any properties of uobjects in async tasks and other threads, but how about just accessing their properites?
Example: I have a complex perception and goal prioritization AI system, which takes all the available (overlapping, for example) actors, extracts possible actions from their components and ranks them based on their weight (which is determined by const function calls, so no side effects, only calculations). In crowds, it becomes incredibly slow to spawn any new AIs, cause they start studying and ranking all 100+ of other guys around them and pretty much freeze the game thread.
I feel like it would be a perfect thing to offload the whole evaluation on separate thread(s) and call delegate to make AI decision as soon as all evaluation is done. However, the evaluation “reads” overlaps, actor locations etc. I have not yet attempted to try and make it work, but do you think there are any problems with this approach?