Best way to spawn a new actor on the floor (no user input)

Development Programming & Scripting
1

Hi all

Making something like an RTS- currently, as a city expands, it spawns improvements around it. To spawn these improvements, I’m selecting a point nearby on the terrain, then I do a raycast from +1000z to -1000z from the selected point, and then take the hit z as the height for the spawn point. Is this the smartest/most efficient way to get a the height? The terrain and city points are procedural, so I can’t do any prepared points etc.

2

Yep. Pretty much the only way to do this without some predefined places to build or a builder minion having to walk there first.

Traces / Raycasts are not seriously expensive and since I assume there won’t be hundreds of thousands a second for this usecase you are totally fine in every way.

3

Thanks for the answer! If it’s not too expensive, I’m totally fine with that method, it just seemed like on of those things that there’s some predefinied function for that I don’t know about yet, being new to UE.

I’m trying to get a trace channel for terrain to work, but have had no joy. Right now, my cities are surrounded by walls of stacked improvements -.-