FAQ: Unreal Engine SDK
Questions about our Unreal Engine SDK? Let's solve them!
Last updated
Questions about our Unreal Engine SDK? Let's solve them!
Last updated
To make emotes as immersive as possible, Kinetix had to deal with interpenetrations issues that gamers are witnessing all the time through a specific proprietary AI model called "Contact Aware Retargeting". Learn more:
Every emotes distributed through Kinetix SDK and API can be optimized with the "contact aware retargeting" that retargets emotes on the target rig before their distribution.
To request Contact-Aware Retargeting, head to How to get Contact-Aware Retargeting for your avatars
To optimize user experience, retargeting process is queued as explained in Animation System - UE. It means that we ensure all user-generated emotes that appear as loaded on the players side will always be available to be played by them at anytime. Emotes that are still in the queue will appear has been loaded for players.
Our SDK has been developed to solve issues you are experiencing when integrating the User-Generated Emote feature into your project. Among different aspects what we optimized most is: network and memory.
We went through the process and developed a solution that facilitates user-generated emotes integration to a point where you will only have to focus on the fun of managing emotes in your project.
Head over to SDK - Core Package to understand how we solve those problems for you
With our SDK, there is no limit, you can add as many user-generated emotes as you want! Kinetix's SDK has been designed to optimize memory usage.
As explained in Emote networking & caching and Kinanim (Emote streaming), our SDK only loads selected emotes by users to generate related animations. Networking is also optimized with a pose extraction enabling to reduce by >200 times the memory used for broadcasting an animation.
We thought of multiple solutions as historically the animation where only synchronized based on the state and not the poses..
The SDK sends serialized poses through network to limit the charge on spike as it only requires users to download a pose for each active emotes on several frames.
The data you will send, the frequency and the number of players at peak will impact the bandwith of the server and your users.
For optimisations purposes (especially for mobile and low connections) considering you can have up to 500 gamers at same time in the same room, Kinetix recommends the following optimisations:
Reduce Serialiazed Data: During serialisation you can choose which data you want to serialize. This can be updated through the KinetixCore configuration with an instance of KinetixCore.Network configuration.
Reduce the frame rate : Reducing the frame rate will reduce the amount of poses sent over time and will result in lower bandwidth charge. You can test out the quality for lower Frame rate but we recommend to keep a frame rate at a minimum of 20.
AOI (Area of interest) : While receiving serialized pose from clients, you can determine which other clients will need to apply those poses based on their positions, or if they are visible for example.
Omission : During spike, we recommend to keep a small amount of user networking emotes. In that case you can setup a limit of N players playing an emote simultaneously handled by your network and send a maximum users emote poses based on your server bandwidth limitations.
To unlock self-expression in games, Kinetix had to make the necessary to allow as much players as possible to play Emotes at the same time! When hundreds of players use their loaded Emotes at the same time our smart networking solution optimize peer-to-peer connection. As detailed in Network - UE SDK our SDK only extracts poses of played Emotes and shared that reduced pose information with the other players.
Eventually, we allow you to decide the memory allocated to the Emote networking so you can optimize it based on your needs. From our various tests we identified 50 Mo as recommended memory.
Discover how to manage Network - UE SDK
Regarding the transfer of poses, it is possible to get the pose in byte[] and apply it through our SDK.
While getting a Pose it is possible to transfer this data through your server and redirect it to the other needed peers.
While other peers receive the pose (byte[]), you can apply the received pose of the peer through our SDK.
http://docs2x.smartfoxserver.com/DevelopmentBasics/sfsobject-sfsarray
https://docs.kinetix.tech/gs-2/unity/initialize-core-package/network
The Photon samples are juste exemples of an implementation through a network solution, but can work in a agnostic way through Photon, Unity Networking or even SmartFox Server.
When switching to production, you have to request an Unlimited Key (go to Developer Portal for more info). Once you log your Unlimited key in Kinetix SDK, your inventory is automatically cleaned as no Emotes are associated with the new Unlimited key.
You can remove user-generated emotes from a player's bag through your Developer Portal account. Head to the UGC Moderation tab to do so, and follow the flow.
For Unreal Engine, Kinetix uses the standard built-in system for animation. This means you typically don’t need any additional plugins to animate bones or cloth physics when integrating Kinetix’s AI Avatar Animation. The engine’s native capabilities should suffice for most use cases, providing smooth integration and performance. However, if you have specific requirements or complex setups, consider reviewing Unreal Engine’s documentation or consulting with our support team for tailored advice.