This is just a partial answer to your question but:
I actually discovered something today. Components have a boolean “Is Editor Only” property. If it is set to true, it will be excluded from cooked builds. This does exactly what we want (at least for components).
I hope we will get the same for actors and objects as well
It’s really important that when using that property with scenecomponents, all of the children also have that option set! Putting an editor-only billboard as the root and putting your mesh under that will break in crazy ways (all components at origin or other madness).
I hope we will get the same for actors and objects as well
putting your mesh under that will break in crazy ways
I hope Epic Games will start to deliver complete features someday.
PS. I also want Editor only content in Asset Browser (excluding cooked folders does not work for plugins) and EditorOnly EventGraphs in Blueprints, for Blutility functions. (because if you use some functions from Editor plugins or modules cooking will fail.)
From one of our team members:
There’s a virtual that any object can override, called IsEditorOnly, and actors can flag themselves from blueprints as bIsEditorOnlyActor in the advanced section of Cooking category
Meaning, even if we place an actor inside a level, it wont be placed in the level of the final cooking build? Sweet!
(I just want some clarification because there has been some confusion about this before)
Yes, I’ve tested that just a few days ago: if you implement IsEditorOnly() with return true; in your Actor class, it is not cooked into the release build game.
OMG! Can IsEditorOnly be used to dynamically decide whether to save a particular object in a particular case? I have a use case: How to do conditional serialization properly? - Programming & Scripting - Unreal Engine Forums - can you please take a look and confirm?
Yes, probably since it is indeed dynamic, but there might be some more specific flag to specify that an actor is “Transient” (not in front of a computer right now)
The next question to ask is, how do you exclude particular Blueprints from non-editor builds in a way that works well for plugins meant to be reused across projects?
bIsEditorOnlyActor = true;