thanks, that’s interesting. I’ll take a look further into this.
I was thinking that I may be able to use Event Dispatchers as well which may help. Actors in the level could just bind to dispatches from the game mode, which means game mode doesn’t have to reference them.
But still at the beginning of the game, level actors would have to be loaded. Perhaps the usage of soft references isn’t so much for the purpose of actors - more for content. In all the examples I saw, it looked like he was using soft references to reference to things like skeletal/static mesh components, materials and stuff like that.
I don’t know how the lower-level stuff works and it’s probably deeper than I have need to consider, but it’s a curiosity and might help me improve memory usage as well - when game is first started, obviously everything in the game has to be made available somehow. When we are talking about references, it is probably just about to what degree are they made available, right?
So a hard reference has the asset and all of it’s dependencies immediately available. That is like, loaded in RAM I guess?
And a soft reference might be somewhere a little “further away”, and for it to accessed we first have to load it into more immediately available place.
Is it just not a possibility to load actors into a level at runtime without them being “staged” in RAM, assuming I am understanding this correctly?