May 3rd, 2024 Video

Lightweight Actors

https://youtube.com/embed/yIKjR5jVv9Y?autoplay=1&start=373&end=521

Topics

• Satisfactory Updates > Released > Satisfactory 1.0
• Features > Save System
• Technology > Unreal Engine

Transcript

for our game speaking of objects that may occur frequently everywhere we've now introduced a system that sort of converts several architectural buildables that players don't interact with, or you know don't produce anything into Data only objects, currently these buildables are what's referred to as heavy actors in a real like buildings that have like logic and actually do stuff, the most common examples going data only would be you know foundations walls or architectural buildables like railings or stairs and such what changing the fancy term means is that we're basically cutting a lot of fat from a massive amount of stuff present in almost all factories so now we only store The crucial data for these things like locations the mesh that's using customization data such as like the colors and the recipe that we built with and the cool thing with all this like light data stored in a pre-prepared location in memory is that writing it to save data will be much faster so hopefully this will reduce the time the game stalls, when saving when you have like a big old factory we're also skipping a bunch of steps when Gathering save data for these lightwe buildables, related to production which also saves a bunch of, time on that note, lad times could also be a lot faster than 1.0 and and actually quite substantially faster, because when all objects were heavy actors spawning them was costly because because we had a bunch of code that was like running through everything, loading it all no matter if it was a foundation piece or if it was an assembler being spawned so having nonproduction build be lightweight allows us to skip a bunch of this code and you know set your files up faster and the actual safe files will also be a lot smaller non-production buildables being lightweight lightweight, by the way I just realized I probably haven't pronounced lightweight properly but it's too late we're too deep into we got to keep going non- production buildable being lightweight also helps decrease runtime memory consumption you know actors are huge in unreal and with so many heavy actors turned lightweight, enjoy not having like every inch of your RAM being you know used up by satisfactory this also connects to multiplayer because when actors are replicated to clients in Unreal Engine it requires that those clients allocate memory to track the state of the actors lightweight buildables means that this extra data is no longer needed so yeah tldr lightweight system makes stuff that don't have logic a lot smaller and easier to load and good and on the client side when playing multiplayer joining a game is also much faster now because processing those lightweights is so much faster than plowing through all these like heavy actors that existed before there's also a ton of General