Significance Manager: Bucket System

In any game, especially multiplayer ones with many players or AI characters, maintaining high performance is crucial. This often involves reducing scene complexity to achieve your target frame rates. With this bucket system integrated with significance manager you will be able to meet your performance targets with ease.

This system can also be used to activate/deactivate gameplay elements when players are nearby. Very flexible!

5.1 Version available for verified users.

Trailer (500 Actors Example)

Discord

Documentation

You can imagine it as having multiple buckets you fill with water. When one bucket becomes full, you fill up the next one until you have no more buckets to fill. Instead of water we use actors or objects and we can set different sizes for the buckets.

Practical Examples:

• AI Management: In a scenario with many AI characters, the system can ensure only the nearest or most critical ones are fully active, improving performance.
• Multiplayer Optimization: In multiplayer games where many players might gather in one area, the system can for example limit so only the 10 nearest player characters remain fully active, preventing performance drops.
• Different platforms: Only allowing the 5 nearest players to have effects played and disable the rest for windows app and only allowing 1 actor to have effects on android app.

1. Bucket System: You can set up multiple buckets with different priority levels. The highest priority actors go into the first bucket, and as it fills up, the system moves to the next bucket.
2. Component Based: Includes an component that let´s you optimize your actors based on distance and buckets. Supports calculations based on distance and camera view.
3. Easy to use: Setup your buckets once in project settings then reference it on the component.
4. Multiple Platforms: Buckets are stored in configuration files. Can easy be overwritten for different platforms.
5. Custom Control: By evaluating which actors are most significant, the system can deactivate components like particle systems or reduce the frequency of complex AI calculations for less important actors. This reduces the load on your system, helping to meet performance targets.
6. Server Significance Manager: This manager runs only on the server. Increase frame rate for your multiplayer games. Or you can use it to activate/deactivate gameplay elements. Very flexible!
7. Unreal Insights & Stats support: Helps you identify bottlenecks!
8. C++ & Blueprint: Events when a bucket is relevant for an actor. A Subsystem to control the system during runtime.
9. Example Level: An example level on how to use the system.