Think I found another option. Just good ol’ object pool with an exception. I’m spawning in an Actor with Tick disabled and all it contains is a Niagara system. That’s it. I gave up after 17k since my FPS wasn’t budging. The spawner will manage the movement as usual. I haven’t added the movement yet, but the act of spawning them in WITHOUT having to use a data representation of their appearance is a huge help to me at least. Will try adding movement in the spawner this week.
Niagara collisions was working to extent, but it’s noticable with the projectile misses when it shouldn’t due to frame delay.
Edit: Seams to work fine. The biggest hit to performance is the rendering to the GPU. That can be improved some by going back to data driven approach and feeding that data to a Niagara system, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever need to. 500 projectile objects being live indefinitely (recycling them) causes no performance hit and it’s unlikely I’ll ever even have that many.