About Weak Object Pointers in Blueprint

Development Programming & Scripting C++
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1

I just discovered TWeakObjectPtr in C++ can be exposed as BlueprintReadWrite. If i remembered it correctly, this wasn’t possible in earlier engine versions and you have to create getter functions to retrieve the raw pointer. Some of my concerns:

  1. Does this magically turn the the underlying weak pointer into a strong one? (Regardless, wrapping around a weak pointer with UPROPERTY feels… wrong)
  2. Will it reduce overhead in BP since it’s directly referencing the member variable instead of calling a blueprint getter function?
2

No it does not turn it into strong reference.

Yes a variable get is generally faster than calling a getter.

Note that if the variable is marked with a BlueprintGetter, the VariableGet node will transform into a CallFunction node to call the getter under the hood, so it’s the same in that case.

3

Though minimal, but everything “under the hood” could still run faster than directly calling that function in BP as it’s pure C++.
I may refactor part of my code for this feature.