Goldanniyatech

Semiotization of 3D Worlds and Unreal Engine Architecture:
Creating a Debug Room

Last Edit: August 2026

Work in Progress

This post is a very early draft, so expect work-in-progress content, incomplete sections, and some typos.

I will be updating and polishing it regularly!

Introduction

The Debug Room is a very effective tool sometimes used in game development. From both a semiotics and a technical perspective, this area is particularly interesting because it’s usually isolated from the rest of the virtual world, especially in an open-world game.

It’s like a small isolated laboratory where all features and interactions of a game can be tested, in most cases.

Using my game Goldanniyatech, I will analyze the specific characteristics of the Debug Room through both a semiotics and a technical lens.

My goal is to understand how this space produces a unique and paradoxical semiotic rupture: by simplifying the player’s virtual experience and stripping away the multiplicity of signs, it enables a stronger semiotization of the virtual world and makes the overall experience richer.

Architecture of the illusion

To explore the heart of the (de)-semiotization process that happens inside a Debug Room, I will focus on the architecture of Unreal Engine 5, which is built upon two key concepts of the object-oriented programming paradigm: inheritance and composition.

Unreal provides a base class named UObject, used to instantiate most engine classes (we can call them built-in classes), such as AActor or ACharacter (the latter is actually derived from AActor). The only exceptions are certain data structures, such as FText or FVector, which do not inherit from UObject.

Moreover, classes that inherit from UObject integrate features generated by the Unreal Header Tool (UHT), including reflection, serialization, garbage collector, and other engine-level stuff.

In other words, mechanisms that do not exist in standard C++, unlike languages such as C#, for instance (hence Unity’s native reflection 😅).

Besides, Unreal 5 is quite different from Unity’s architecture, since Unity is closer to a Component-Based Architecture (CBA), where entities (called GameObjects in Unity) are empty containers that hold components.

Conceptually, the CBA is similar to the Entity-Component-System (ECS), which explains why some people are mixing both. However, Unity’s GameObject model is still object-oriented with composition, whereas a true ECS is a data-oriented paradigm.

Unity’s actual implementation of ECS is DOTS, while Unreal provides a (notoriously complex 🤡) data-oriented framework, Mass Entity.

Also, the next iteration, Unreal Engine 6, will shift to a new, more data-oriented architecture with a new Scene Graph, components, and prefabs. UEFN already showcases a glimpse of what Unreal Engine 6 will be.

Semiotization of 3D Worlds and Unreal Engine Architecture: Creating a Debug Room

Introduction

Architecture of the illusion

References

Semiotization of 3D Worlds and Unreal Engine Architecture:
Creating a Debug Room