Hello, I’m working on a space flying game for fun and my goal is to create a UMG widget that will list nearby enemies, planets etc on a scrollbox in ascending order of distance, not unlike something you would see in any space or flying sim. At the moment my setup is essentially a “Populate List” function that is called with an event (not tick, should start fresh each time) that does the following:
-Fires a sphere overlap to grab all the actors of class in range
-Does some mucking about with arrays to re-arrange the actors by distance from the player
-References the new sorted array to create “Radar Entry” widgets for each actor.
And it works, sort of. The “Entry” widgets are successfully added as children to the scrollbox parent, in ascending order of distance as desired, however the problem is that it only works once. Once the widgets are created once, they always re-create exactly the same, even when the actors in range have changed, or the distance from player has changed as if the player was in the exact same spot they were the first time the function was fired. You might be thinking that I just wasn’t updating cosmetic data on the entry, but I definitely am because if I check the arrays with a print string I know the arrays are working properly and if I check the distances from player on a tick, they are reading correctly. Besides, as you can see in the screenshot I’ve attached, I’m clearing the scrollbox children and wiping clear the arrays on each call, with the intention of just re-populating the list fresh each time, and yet it doesn’t work.
I have read a lot that UMG widgets can be fussy when doing lots of parenting/unparenting because they are held in memory even when they are cleared. I tried messing around with garbage collection and that didn’t do anything.
My current solution also just doesn’t feel that polished, I would like it if it could keep track of distances dynamically and update so it’s always in order of distance without rebuilding the entire UI but I can’t wrap my head around how to do that in blueprint.
Bottom line, I feel like this is a pretty typical mechanic you would see in a game and I would be very curious to know how someone else would implement it better. Feel free to tell me I’m way off-track 
FYI, I’m pretty handy with blueprints but I don’t know how to C++ unfortunately.
Thanks in advance for any help from the community!
