UASSET on a server (download on demand)

[TriNityGER]

You can mount PAKs at runtime and instantiate the uassets from there. The same thing should also work with .uassets(PAK are nothing more than containers for uassets.).
Direct guides are sparse on this topic but I found some examples on the answerhub: https://answers.unrealengine.com/que…t-runtime.html
The overall idea is quite simple. Load the pak, find the asset you want to load and then instantiate it.

As for the download of the uassets/paks theres another really nice answerhub post: https://answers.unrealengine.com/que…le-online.html

I quoted the guide here if the answerhub is down for whatever reason.

Fact that you can use http urls as files is a extra feature to make things comfitible, but in code they are 2 separate data channels with diffrent APIs.
UE4 has module to talk to HTTP server:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…TTP/index.html
This is entry point:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…Get/index.html
Create a http request:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…est/index.html
I returns request body which you can edit with those functions:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…est/index.html
Request is processed asynchronously so it does not lock the thread waiting for response from server, thats why you need to bind event which be called when responce been recived:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…ete/index.html
Once you set up the request you call ProcessRequest and HTTP module with do the rest:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…est/index.html
And once it got reponce it will call function you binded with IHttpReponce argument from which you can read reponce data:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…ase/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest…nse/index.html
Here you have nice simple example from engine source code how to use it (Note how OnProcessRequestComplete function arguments, your function needs to be exactly the same, only name can be different):
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealE…/HttpTests.cpp
If you don’t know how HTTP works (which if you ever worked with PHP and web devlopment you should know) then learn about it because it will be very useful here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypert…nsfer_Protocol
And lastly if you gonna use HTTP module, remember to add “HTTP” in to depency in build scipt same as you do with “AIModule”, otherwise you gonna have linker errors

by the way depending on your game you can start downloading the files when the player has reached a specific point ingame(like level X or when he reached a transition zone.). Thats how we did it for our unity game. The user never notices that he has to download more.