Cleaning unused UMG Widget References... Am I hacking?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
1

To ease comunication from the entire game with the UMG I’m doing all the widget manipulation through the HUD BP plus a widget that just “holds” the desired elements as childs, but there are not internal references on this One2RuleAll guy, I just get his Canvas borrowed and add childs created (and referenced) on the BP, I got this way a method to “eject” the unused widgets from the HUD by calling RemoveFromParent() from their “HUDhosted” variables.

OK, it’s working.

BUT… Some from these widgets are just what I called “one timers”, what means that after displayed to the player they’ll just appears again on most cases after a long, long time. I’ve called the RemoveFromParent, they get out from Screen but their references still “alive” for a very long time. (I did a test with the “?Is Valid” Node on the HUDTick).

To try to contour the situation I’m Setting these variables with none attached on then:

bf642f2dd6c6cbb07c2c27233c9089c134f11d58.jpeg

It’s working through the “?IsValid” test, but I would like to know if this is either “nulling” it or in really benefiting the Garbage Collector in some way by don’t keeping more any asset reference.

Thank you.

2

They’re kept alive as long as anyone holds a reference to the UObject pointer,so nulling out your member variable pointing to them will allow the GC to clean them up.

3

I didn’t found a “NULL”, “nullify”, or anything alike node on BPs, is this “Set” with nothing tied to it acting as a “Null that”? On my first try, I thought it will throw an error as the ones we get on some Nodes that does requires a Target tied to a pin. :smiley:

4

I would guess as just as you make a null check with a compare to nothing, seting a null is setting a object to nothing.