Is there a Reason behind having 18 custom Channels?

I am currently doing a lot of stuff in my Game with LineTraces and different Trace Channels, which have to be different because a Trace can Travel quite Far and should have the ability to travel through every other Trace.
As for now I am using 10 Custom Trace Channels who do a lot of complicated stuff and which are important to not block each other or get hit Results etc.
And another 4 Custom Object Channels, so a total of 14 Custom Channels. (I am pretty sure I can reduce some of them without much problems)

And I am wondering why the Engine is limited to 18 custom channels? Has it something to do with the performance or is it just a hard-coded value? Can it be changed without concerns if it is changable?

I can’t really think of anything performance wise, since in the end its just a Channel which has to be checked and it shouldn’t matter looking for 18 or 30 channels, at least its what I would think.

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It is limited to 18 because internally there is a 32-bit bitfield used to represent the channels. So there are 8 built in channels, 6 unspecfied channels reserved for the engine, and then 18 available for the game to use.

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Thanks for the Information! So I have to watch out and tweek my stuff to not be in Danger of hitting that Limit :slight_smile:

I can’t say anthing about it yet, but maybe sometime in the future :slight_smile: