What DO you use threads for in UE4?

[Shmoopy1701]

@StefanHohnwald

But isn’t GameMode:Tick (and any Actor:Tick, for that matter) executed on the main thread anyway? So it’s not really reading/writing from another thread.

Could you post an example?
As far as i know modifying and especially spawning or removing UObjects isn’t thread-safe unless you make them thread-safe by using mutexes and such for thread-critical code areas, but i’d love to be proven wrong on this one.

You get the benefit of offloading work this way to any number of separate threads/processes, but without the hassle of forcing Unreal to be thread safe.

• run a dedicated world simulation in a separate process/thread/physical machine
• connect to process via some messaging service
• read and dispatch messages from the world simulation during GameMode.Tick()

Depending on how much work you push to the backend, your Unreal client can become just a dumb “UI” that doesn’t do much logic.