Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial - Data Layers 

can you spawn / move them at runtime or is it fixed in the location you placed it when creating the level?

Yeah I can imagine player walks in a hidden trigger box, a glass smashes behind them, they turn around and the door they came in through is now dirty looking corridor. Definitely good for some psychological horror aspects.

Cool am wondering can I use a collision trigger to activate it

First thing I thought of when first hearing about data layers :D Indeed very horror compatible.

Yeah I noticed this. You have to create a data layer data table, but it prompts you to do so. Then open that and change to run time, then the advanced option appears.

I have the same issue on my side.

Found a solution to this in a comment. Make a Data Layer asset (found in the miscellaneous tab when creating a new asset). You'll need one for each layer you want to use. You can create a new Data Layer in the Data Layers window, but you can't rename it or use it until you assign a Data Layer asset. Once you create one, select the layer, then drop the asset into the slot and you're good to go!

If anyone comes across this in the future: You can't add things like foliage scatter actors to the layers, that solved the issue for me@@mattreevesdev

Not working in 5.1 :) , please make us an updated tutorial , pretty please!

For anyone finding this comment later. Yes we can. Once you have made a data layer, double click it in the datalayer tab and it will say (Current). Everything you do whilst your data layer is set to current will only apply to that data layer. Including foliage. Hope this helps someone

It doesn't really optimize if your goal is just to keep distance objects unloaded. World partitions are already designed with dynamic loading and unloading in mind, so no matter how big your map is if you have it broken into partitions it will stay performant. What data layers are used for is real-time changes to your map, such as removing a town and replacing it with a destroyed one if you fail a quest, or having an "upside down" or alternate dimension version of the same map you want to swap between. Rather than writing your own methods to remove and replace objects, terrain, and other aspects of a large open-world level, data layers utilizes the existing level streaming system to stream out and in these changes rather than streaming out and in distant objects, so you save a ton of development time and performance by using them instead of manual alterations to your game world. Basically, any time that you would want to make changes to groups of objects in an existing map, rather than load and unload them by using tags or another data structure just save them in a data layer and stream them in and out. You'll save time and performance. But if your goal is just to unload distance objects you'll want to mess with the world partition and nanite settings, not data layers, as those are already designed with abstracting and unloading distant geometry in mind.

@@hunteriv4869 Oh ok, that makes a lot of sense since I knew there was world partitions alrdy. Ok, thanks a lot for this detailed explanation!

not sure but loaded means that the objects get loaded but not visible, which may get them displayed faster because it is already in memory, unloaded should take longer but can make the games performance better until you load it in. again not sure but this is how i understood it

@@rageinthecage3900 thanks for enlightening me

@@punchline1729 hehe, better than nothing right? sry

@@rageinthecage3900 all good

@@punchline1729 probably you are beyond this right now, things move fast in gamedev-world ;D

It's not covered in this tutorial, but it's a setting on the actor's detail properties under 'Is spatially loaded' if true it'll load based on the streaming source range in the world partition