Get SpatialOS



The SpatialOS Unreal integration is currently in beta. We’re very open to feedback - don’t hesitate to get in touch on the forums if you have any thoughts.

Querying the world

You can search the SpatialOS world for entities, using entity queries and a query language.

This is useful if you want to get information about entities, including entities outside the area of the world that your Unreal worker instance knows about. A query can return entity IDs, so you can query for entities that you want to [invoke a command on](/reference/12.0(/reference/12.0/unrealsdk/interact-with-world/interact-components#sending-a-command), or delete.

You can currently use the base C++ SDK or Blueprints to create queries. This page gives a short introduction to queries, but for a fuller reference, see the C++ worker API section on Entity queries.


Building and sending a query in C++

Set up the query

It’s common to have a single “Spawner” entity in the world’s starting snapshot, with a single component Spawner. This entity is responsible for creating a player entity for UnrealClient workers when they connect.

To find this entity from the UnrealClient worker, you would build the following query:

const worker::query::EntityQuery& entity_query = {
    worker::query::ComponentConstraint { improbable::spawner::Spawner::ComponentId },
    worker::query::SnapshotResultType {}

Make sure you include the header files of any components you reference.

Sending a query

Send a query and listen for the response by directly using the Connection and View exposed by the C++ SDK. The connection can be accessed from the USpatialOS object.

To send a query:

auto requestId = spatialOS->GetConnection().SendEntityQueryRequest(entity_query, 0));

The example code above assumes that you have access to a pointer to the USpatialOS of your project. In the Unreal Starter Project, this object is stored in the StarterProjectGameInstance.

To listen for a response using the requestId returned by SendEntityQueryRequest():

spatialOS->GetView().OnEntityQueryResponse([this, requestId](const worker::EntityQueryResponseOp& op) {
    if (op.RequestId != requestId)
    if (op.StatusCode != worker::StatusCode::kSuccess)
        std::string errorMessage = "Could not find spawner entity: " + op.Message;
        // output error
    if (op.ResultCount == 0)
        std::string errorMessage = "Query returned 0 spawner entities";
        // output error
    auto spawnerEntityId = op.Result.begin()->first;
    // do something with the spawner's entity ID


Building and sending a query in Blueprint

To send an entity query in Blueprint you first need to set up your query. The query consists of one or more query constraints. These constraints can be combinations of EntityId Query Constraint, ComponentId Query Constraint and Sphere Query Constraint. There are helper functions supplied to create these constraints from FEntityId, FComponentId or an FVector position and radius.

You can send these queries to either Entity Query Count Request (which returns the number of entities that match the supplied query) or Entity Query Snapshot Request (which returns the FEntityId’s of the matching entities). These functions are accessible from the SpatialOS Commander class.

Entity query example

  1. Set up your constraints.

    Entity query example

    This constraint is set up so that it will match any entities in either sphere.

  2. Send query request.

    Entity query example

  3. Use the result from the callback.

    Entity query example

A more advanced example

In this example we query for entities that are inside a sphere and has a ‘HeartbeatReceiver’ component.

Entity query example

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