I want to create the ability to construct buildings, like you would in a strategy game, and naturally you shouldn’t be able to build on top of other building or obstacles.
What I want to do is access the actor, or possibly one of its components, to get its bounds so that I can use that to do collision checking before allowing the building to be placed.
What’s the best way to do this?
I’ve looked at the CDO but I don’t think it would work for this. Or is it possible to create an actor without adding it to the world?
Spawn the actor, assign a special material to it, or just set it’s material opacity to 0.x and add some pulsing effect to it, set the collision mode to overlap and then you can check in tick or with events if some actors overlap. You can filter those by a special collision channel so that only objects that should block the constructions get detected as overlapping. When there are no overlapping components, you can allow the player to build that house by either manually changing the material and collision channels, or deleting this actor and spawning a new one with the real material and properties. Thats probably the safer way, long-term.