First, I would like to apoligise in advance for my poor english skills, I tried my best but there are things which are simply beyond my understanding of the language.
Im primarly a 3d artist and designer, but in the last year I had to learn c++. Now I have the opportunity to work on my "dreamproject", a game similar to the old Nexus:The Jupiter Incident and Imperium Galactica games. As I understood this is not exactly what unreal was developped for, but Im at least familiar with this engine at a basic level and know the fbx pipeline well enough.
As I learned in the past when coded smaller projects (mainly backend), you generally want to now where you had initialized your objects for obvious reasons.
My first question would be that what happens when you drag&drop an object from the content explorer to the editor. I assume its gonna make a new instance of it as every class instancing. However, because its not a traditional fps or something like that, I would need some kind of container for these to iterate through on them (I have missiles which need to be shoot down). Whats the preferable way of getting a reference to every object with the same baseclass, without having to hunt for them in the editor? I thought about initialising them from c++, then set the spawn location manually from code after trying in the editor, but thats a bit of a stupid solution.
The second question is about widgets and ui. I imagined a dinamic UI, where I would draw a button/icon/something for every enemy ship/npc/object in realtime (or close to realtime) in a widget, manage my ship in a second, etc. Whats the easiest way of doing it, preferably with multiple widgets on the viewport.
These are probably pretty noob questions, but I just cant get the base design concept right, and frankly Im a bit tired of bashing my head against the wall. Thank you for you patience, and sorry again for the stupid questions 