Best way to link 2 actors through pointers.

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

When I got an actor which spawns another actor. And I need to connect both of those actors with the help of pointers, whats the best way to do so.

I was using UPROPERTY() pointer to do such kind of links.



UPROPERTY()
AActor* Actor

But, I came across many places in the engine where a SharedPtr and a WeakPtr is used such kinds of links. What are the advantage of using them over normal pointer and how do I link the pointer in that way after spawning?

2

SharedPtr and WeakPtr are for anything derived from TSharedFromThis or anything you might call MakeShareable on (mostly structs).

UPROPERTY() on any pointer that is a UObject (Which includes AActor) will be hard reference
TWeakObjectPtr is the weak reference version for UObjects

See the docs for a more detailed description

Cheers

Kyle

3

Thanks for the link I didn’t came across that page some how…

If I got a character class which spawns an actor called weapon class, which pointers should I use to link them both?

4

You should be fine using a normal pointers.

5

Isn’t TSharedFromThis only necessary if you want to obtain the SharedPtr from the class itself? I don’t think you need to inherit from TSharedFromThis use it with SharedPtr.

Thanks

6

Thats right, you can also call MakeShareable on an instance that is not based on TSharedFromThis to get a shared pointer.