Exploring Four Methods for Handling Projectiles in UE5 | Inside Unreal

Many Unreal Engine beginners build their first projectiles by spawning an actor with ProjectileMovementComponent. That’s not a bad choice, it’s straightforward and easy to implement. But what if your game needs hundreds or thousands of projectiles? At that scale, performance, memory, and maintainability all start to break down. So, what are your real options?

In this session, Michael Royalty walks through four practical projectile‑handling methods in Unreal Engine, explaining how they work, when to use them, and how they scale. Two are actor‑based, two are data‑driven, and each solves a different class of gameplay problem.

You’ll learn the strengths and weaknesses of:

Spawn & Destroy Actors — The simplest approach, ideal for lower projectile counts
Pooled Actors — Reuse projectiles instead of constantly spawning and destroying them
Trace‑Hit — Eliminate projectile actors for improved performance, with tradeoffs
Multi‑Trace — A purely data‑driven method for large‑scale or bullet‑hell‑style systems

We’ll look at benchmarks, discuss Blueprint vs C++, and break down which update paths benefit most from moving logic into native code. You’ll also see how rendering options like Static Meshes, Instanced Static Meshes, and Niagara fit into a scalable projectile architecture.

Whether you’re building your first shooter or trying to scale an existing one, this talk will give you a practical framework for choosing the right projectile system for your game.