1.
Using ScyllaDB for
Distribution of Game
Assets in Unreal Engine
Joakim Lindqvist, Senior Tools Programmer

2.
Joakim Lindqvist
■ Senior Tools Developer within the Foundation team of
Unreal Engine
■ 15 years experience working in games
■ Based out of Stockholm, Sweden

3.
■ The complexity of building games
■ Overview of Unreal Cloud DDC
■ Future work
Agenda

4.
The Complexity of
Building Games

5.
Games are Complicated to Make
■ 2 major types of content, source code and game assets
■ Large assets
■ Large teams work on them
■ Specialized skill - spread out across the world

6.
The Process of Cooking Data
■ Cooking is data transformation
■ Historically cached on network file systems within a office
■ Geo distribution
■ Work From Home
■ Headache to scale storage
■ Can take hours to start up the editor without caching

7.
Unreal Cloud DDC

8.
Cached Objects
■ Custom self describing binary
format called Compact Binary
■ Structured object with
attachments that are content
addressed
■ Content addressing
■ Deduplication
■ Avoids replicating the same
content
{
“name”: “largeFile”,
“size” : 2480,
“attachment”: 9fffabc5e0a…1f084f8c5e
}

9.
■ Kubernetes
■ 5 regions
■ 7 TB local nvme cache
■ ~50 TB S3 storage
■ 10-500 users per region
■ Last access tracking
Unreal Cloud DDC

10.
Architecture
ScyllaDB
(Metadata)
Web api
Local NVME
AWS S3
(Blob
Storage)
ScyllaDB
(Metadata) Web api
AWS S3
(Blob
Storage)

11.
Why ScyllaDB
■ Performance sensitive workload
■ Geo replicated database
■ Eventual consistency works well with our workload
■ Small deployment (2-3 nodes of i4i.xlarge/i4i.2xlarge) in 5 DCs
■ ~3000 req/s per node

12.
Future Work

13.
Future Work
■ Small blob storage in ScyllaDB
■ ScyllaDB on Azure
■ Performance improvements on the API
■ Extending to more workloads

14.
■ Source Code: https://github.com/EpicGames
Unreal Engine

15.
Thank You
Stay in Touch
Joakim Lindqvist
joakim.lindqvist@epicgames.com
twitter.com/J0CC0
github.com/jocco
www.linkedin.com/in/jocco/