The recently released Unreal Engine 5.1 brought a new feature to help with faster and smaller data syncs: Virtual Assets.Currently in Beta, Virtual Assets provide a way to decouple structured data from bulk data, enabling developers to sync only what they need from source control systems such as Perforce. This results in smaller workspaces and faster syncs for developers who don’t need access to the full object data.
In this tech blog, Senior Product Manager Grace Yen and Lead Developer of Virtual Assets Paul Chipchase from the Unreal Engine team take a deep dive into Virtual Assets so you can assess whether they’d be a good fit for your project.
What problems do Virtual Assets solve?
Over the last few generations of game development, we’ve noticed some interesting data trends relating to project sizes. Not only are project sizes getting bigger (we informally polled some of our licensees to verify this), but many developers are moving to a Games-as-a-Service (GaaS) model, with continuous updates through multi-year game lifecycles.
We’ve also seen teams continuously evolving the way updates are delivered. Some teams opt for “feature streams” to help keep bleeding-edge features from affecting the rest of the team until the build has been stabilized, ready for release.
We’ve observed some team members work between release lines of their products (to support live services), and also models with “main” and “advanced” type dev workstreams.
This poses another challenge, where team members are often at the brink of exhausting their SSD space and sometimes have to make wasteful decisions to unsync a workstream they will likely need again soon, in order to make room for the current work they are doing.
Pre-pandemic, some studios (including ours) experienced challenges with sync sizes and sync times. We deployed solutions such as Performance Edge servers to try to give users a faster access point. However, when we were required to work from home back in 2020, we started to experience the pain of team members not having reliable internet connections, or having wildly varying internet speeds.
Putting together the best teams sometimes means that team members are located in different places—and we think that dynamic is here to stay. Even in the hybrid scenario where team members spend time in two locations, we can have the compounded problem of needing to sync up multiple times to hardware assigned by location.
With powerful technology such as Nanite, UE5’s virtualized geometry system designed to achieve pixel-scale detail and high object counts, we expect project sizes to grow even bigger in the future.
Source: Unreal Engine Blog