He meant a TL in the underlying class owning the component; which would work more than OK for 1 door. Setting up multiple door opening / closing simultaneously, would be a tad trickier.
tl;dr: since vans generally have 1 sliding door, I’d use a TL in the car actor and move on… Other than that, read on.
Consider using a Timer:
Pros
- you can choose how fast they fire
- decoupled from framerate by default
- Tick can sample elapsed time (and / or incorporate delta time)
- use their elapsed / remaning time as Lerp alpha
- can be (un)paused
- you can incorporate a curve to mimic that of a TL
- unlike a TL, it can live inside a component
Cons:
- not as neat as a TL and you must script the entire behaviour
Probably much lighter on resources than a timeline component. Probably.