⚠️Upcoming Changes
Deprecation
As the platform matures, we are assessing the features and content made available in MSquared to ensure we deliver things we feel add the most value to the platform. The following are areas that will likely see heavy revision or removal over the next few months. We will make sure these changes are reflected in our release notes and documentation at the point they will affect developers.
While the content and systems mentioned here will remain functional, we advise developers to move away from these at their earliest convenience and consider implementing their own alternatives.
Interactions
Version targeted for Deprecation: TBD
Interaction systems are common in Unreal projects. While ours may serve as a quick start for some projects, it adds overhead to the Player Character for those that do not wish to use it. The system and any props using it will be removed.
Focus Cam, First Person Camera & Over-the-shoulder Camera
Version targeted for Deprecation: TBD
In order to simplify our base Player Character, we are removing this to allow developers to implement their own advanced character behaviour without requiring the opinionated implementation currently available. These alternative camera modes will be removed, leaving the standard third-person view.
M2 Standard UI (Skinning & Data-Driven UI)
Version targeted for Deprecation: TBD
The data-driven UI allowed a number of early projects to build HUDs quickly, but the need for extension and customisation on top of this is now outstripping the capabilities of the system. In order for MSquared to focus on developing the areas of the platform that only we can, we are dropping support for this feature and encouraging developers to build their own Widgets to replace those currently provided in the platform. All widgets built with this system will be removed and not all will be replaced.
Further to the above, the following will also be removed in the near future:
Morpheus Teams
Leaderboards
Remote Viewers
Approachable Controls (Click to move)
Simplification
These are things that are not being removed from the platform but will be considerably refactored. Please consider whether you would prefer to use the upcoming alternatives here or will require guidance in migrating to your own versions of these systems.
No timeline on this work has been set, but we will update our users as it becomes appropriate to do so. Please use your support channels to raise any concerns.
Social
Our current chat system that spans Web and Unreal will no longer be supported. The requirements of our users are not fully served by the current solution and rather than extending it beyond what we can support, we are working to make it easier for users to integrate their own solutions instead.
MSquared will still ship with a chat solution, but this will be limited to only operating within the Unreal experience and will not feature moderation as standard. Guidance will be given for those wishing to replicate the current offering using PubNub and Community Sift.
Emotes
The current emote system duplicates a lot of functionality that exists in another system. The difference is there are more limitations on our emote system and not all of the desired functionality is exposed. The plan is for us to unify these approaches and make the Emotes an example of how to use the underlying "Play anim montage in crowd" functionality, rather than a fully fledged system in itself.
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