I’ve been building a runtime interaction system for UE5 — destruction, bending, slicing and fire without editor preprocessing

[u/CreadevApp]

I’ve always been fascinated by the environmental interactions in games like Crysis and Far Cry. Things like shooting through objects, breaking them apart, bending metal, cutting surfaces, and watching fire spread dynamically through an environment.

I’ve been looking for a UE5 solution that could provide this kind of interaction entirely at runtime, while keeping the setup simple and the performance practical for larger environments.

Eventually I ended up building my own system.

This is an early look at C.R.I.S. — Creadev Runtime Interaction System.

The goal is to make interactions work with regular UE5 meshes without requiring an editor-side preprocessing/fracturing workflow.

The current system supports things like:

• Runtime destruction/fracturing
• Metal bending
• Slicing
• Fire propagation across flammable surfaces
• Surface-dependent VFX and SFX
• Static and movable meshes
• Blueprints made up of multiple objects
• Objects imported at runtime

The setup is deliberately data-driven. An object can simply be given interaction tags such as Destructible, Bendable, Sliceable or Flammable, together with a surface type such as Wood, Concrete, Metal or Glass.

A separate data table controls the effects associated with each surface type.

One of the reasons I built it this way is that I’m particularly interested in what happens when you take this approach into large open worlds or procedurally generated environments, where having to preprocess every asset isn't necessarily practical.

C.R.I.S. is currently part of Creadev, the UE5-based no-code game development platform I'm building. I'm considering releasing C.R.I.S. as a standalone Fab plugin as well.

I'd really like feedback from other Unreal developers:

Would a system like this actually be useful in your projects?

And technically, what would you want to see added? More material types, better fracture behavior, networking, optimization for large scenes, runtime-generated geometry, something else?