WHAT
This week Christian Allen will provide an overview of Hard & Soft Object references in Blueprints, why the differences are important to know about, and how you can utilize Soft Object references in your project to help with memory management.
Yay! I recently started using Soft Object References, but there is so little practical information around about them, that I wasn’t sure if I’m using them correctly ^^’
This will definitely clarify thing up for me! Thanks
Good, because i have a few questions. Should i use a soft reference to handle the status (taken / not taken) of an object/actor that is from a streaming level and is also destroyed if not taken when the level is unloaded, but the level can be loaded again so if must know if the item should spawn or not. Or scenario that should be destroyed, enemies killed, etc… or soft references are not the way to handle that?
The only practical reason I can think of is for not loading objects that are absolutely NOT needed in the level at the time.
Let’s say you have a optional room with objects that the player does not have to go into, you can use soft object ref so you don’t have to load it with the rest of the level. That way, the loading level is small.
Or a clothing system with hundreds of outfits. Loading all of them at runtime will take longer to load than GTAV. With soft object ref. you load what you need.
Can you PLEASE cover SoftObj refs in relation to loading assets from disk and best practices for this? Several of the methods don’t seem to work in StandAlone.
And also, what’s up with serialization for SoftObjRefs? Trying to create a save game that contains one crashes to desktop last I tried (I think it was in 4.20)
edit: whoops, never mind. I just watched the video and it looks like my first question is exactly what you’re already gonna talk about
Yes. This is a vital skill, and the only way to remove pesky frame hitches caused by using hard object references. I’ve only be able to get them to work in C++. Soft references with primary assets ID in BP makes no sense. I hope they cover the steps necessary to make it work in C++, because it was a ***** to figure out how to set up Singletons. (Every step needed to be detailed in the docs.)
