Custom Lightweight Data-Oriented Projectile System In UE5

Tom Looman, known as the author of Unreal Engine courses and educational content, which he occasionally shares for free, like the source code for a simple animation system implementation, has revealed a new experimental project.

It focuses on data-oriented projectiles that operate without Actors, use asynchronous collision queries, and support multiplayer, including client-side prediction. This approach drastically reduces CPU overhead.

Here, it's just one Niagara emitter managing thousands of decals as particles, powered by Data Channels. It dramatically reduces Game Thread overhead by requiring only a single component per grid cell. Also, it enables instancing for decals, which is typically not supported with standard individual decal components.

If the project continues to progress well, Tom may incorporate it into a future course and open-source the project on GitHub. Stay tuned and follow him on X/Twitter and check out his most recent overview of all the performance improvements for Unreal Engine 5.6, including Lumen HWRT for 60Hz, GPU Profiler 2.0, Renderer Parallelization, and more.

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