So I have PDA 1 (Race) which contains references to another PDA type (Body part), and on restart, a section of references are lost within the Body Part assets that are contained within the Race Asset. Basically it looks like this - A ‘race’ data asset, which is used to set values in the character creator system I have, references data of the second PDA type - body part. And mesh data is lost (on Unreal engine restart) in the body part Data Assets - not texture data however, strangely enough.
At construct for my character creator actor, I get a default race data asset to initiate the data driven creator system, and that default race data asset is brought into the BP actor with an Asset Registry search, since I have noticed data assets have issues when being referenced by default in the editor. Inside the race data, there is body part data (mesh and textures), which are used to set skel mesh component values, as well as texture parameters inside a dynamic material instance on those skel mesh components. Basically I have a race data that says here are the default body parts of that race (arms legs etc), and the body part data is simply the enum type + asset references to construct it (mesh + textures).
So for whatever reason I am losing references, and I haven’t been able to find any solutions from searches on this forum or reddit.
Honestly I have no idea how these PDA work, why my pick ups can reference specific Data Assets as a default value of a ‘X data asset’ type variable, and have no issue, but if I reference something like Race data in a character, it wipes a variety of the data out associated with it on editor restart.
Are there known conventions for how to deal with data asset references in unreal engine? Thanks in advance for any help