UE-16317 Child actor components cannot be individually selected in viewport

What the title says.

  1. Make blueprint
  2. Add child actor component, set the class to something
  3. Put blueprint in scene

Observe: The child actor component is visible in the scene outliner as an own actor but cannot be clicked or inspected.

UE-16317 says that’s by design.

Here’s my question: Why is this by design? What is the workaround? How are you gonna debug child actor components with behavior then? Write them in C++ and set breakpoints? I’d like to see the state of the child actor in the editor.

Child actors are very close to being extremely powerful. Why was it decided to not go for it?

There are use cases for this. Example: I’d like to re-use an actor with behavior across many blueprints. I’d like to tweak values of it per parent blueprint. I’d like to be able to change these values at runtime to test things / debug. I’d like to do so without the inconvenience of creating a separate data asset with the parameters for each actor or storing + settings the variables somewhere in their parent blueprint

2 Likes

I really want to see the value of a property on a component of a child actor and I can’t. A great tool for gathering information about issues suddenly isn’t available just because it is a child actor.

2 Likes