If you use ALevelInstance, with DesiredRuntimeBehavior set to "Standalone" (or LevelInstanceRuntimeBehavior::LevelStreaming in C++), the level will have it's own independent data layer manager, so you can configure each instance of a given level instance independently.

You can send "big data" in Unreal without starving out other network traffic by using ReplicateSubobjects.

Fragment your data into subobjects, and interleave them into normal replication by only sending 1 subobject per frame(the first that returns true from Channel->ReplicateSubobject)

If you use ALevelInstance actors in Unreal, they 'broke' their default operation in 5.5 by defaulting bIsEditorOnlyActor=true on the actor, so if you see them missing at runtime, you need to manually disable this.

They have backed out this change in main

Anyone else running into USDCore crashes during client/server cook under 5.5 engine?

Had to disable it and the plugins that depend on it(Fab, MeshPainting, GLTFExporter, InterchangeTests, InterchangeEditor, Interchange)

It's a new plugin to 5.5

What's your favorite first person, melee centric, game combat?

Just to post something of substance, earlier in the year I did a technical writeup of a sync animation implementation I wrote for Unreal for someone on reddit. I wrote the glory kill system for DOOM(2016), and on my new project, we wanted something similar.

docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Looks like Epic is planning on deprecating non instanced gameplay abilities in GAS, starting in 5.5

Good riddance I say

Started upgrading our Unreal Engine version to 5.5. Normally I would wait until a couple point releases to avoid any stability surprises, but this time there are too many new shinys to wait on.

Gonna try to brain dump into the ether a bit about game dev from my day to day experiences. Maybe make some like-minded developer connections.