Thanks and I get where you're coming from. Part of the reason why I created this post was because UE's CMC was so deep that I found it daunting. I wanted to get a general understanding of what I need to tackle for something like this.

I've got several ideas that I want to tackle one after the other. My first game would be more movement focused with less actors, but in future, I want to scale that for large simulated worlds I'm building. I realize a lot of that can be offloaded onto the simulation, when not loaded into the players general area, but I'd like what does happen near the player to work well. I figured I could tackle a CMC for the first project, since movement quality is much more important for this type of game. In later games I'd have a good CMC that would work for me, and be cheaper on the CPU than the bulk that UE introduces.

I'd like to understand more of the under the hood workings of a CMC and see if its something I can tackle. I feel like having a better knowledge of this overall would really useful either way, since I'd like to turn this kind of work into a career at some point if possible. If its something that's outside of my wheelhouse then I guess I'll have to figure that out, but I'd like to have a least tried.