We are interested in exploring the Chaos Mover in a future project, but we are weary of its experimental status. We believe the current feature set is already impressive and would fit perfectly in our project, it solves a lot of issues of the existing Mover component. It has progressed a great deal since it was first introduced in 5.4.
It seems that the Chaos Mover is already used in Beta status in UEFN via General Physics. It seems that it was used for the Bean controller in the Fall Guys Fortnite crossover. So Epic already considers that it is stable enough to be used in user facing projects.
The 5.8 Release expresses that the recent changes are important steps to taking the Plugin out of experimental and into Beta. What are the missing elements for the plugin to be considered ready for Beta, and does Epic have an ETA on that happening?
On our end we noted some issues in functions that couldn’t be implemented in blueprint, or a bug in a data validation function. But overall the examples work great.
Could the Engine team share a rough road-map for the Chaos Mover? Especially on the replication side.
The main thing going into Beta is locking down the API & data format. Once we advance to Beta, we have more stringent rules about potentially affecting licensee projects and it slows our iteration time. We’re shooting for Mover/ChaosMover to be in shape for Beta this year, and the remaining big ticket items are:
(1) Separation of logic and data in the layered moves, modifiers, etc. so that instances are no longer structs, but a uobject and separate instanced struct data. This will allow extension without C++. We’ll also extend deep reconciliation checks to them.
(2) Switching all uses of the original blackboard with the new rollback-aware blackboard
I don’t have a detailed roadmap to share yet, but these are some of the main focuses for the remainder of 2026:
\- converging Mover \+ ChaosMover simulations to eliminate overlap
\- expanding support for movement of Scene Graph entities
\- use of delta compression through Iris for networking efficiency, across all Mover cases
\- we are steadily getting improvements to the Networked Physics system that improve performance and configurability broadly, not just for ChaosMover
That is the next official binary release, yes. However we expect the plugins to be upgraded to Beta well before then, and I believe it will be straightforward for a dev team to integrate the beta version into a 5.8 version of the engine.
We’ll attempt this and document the results ourselves as part of a upgrade guide.