Items disappearing on level load as if owner not set (UE4)

Hello all, I’m observing unexpected behaviour when dealing with unloading 1 level and moving to another.

Owner can be set after an actor is created, but it seems as if the level streaming does not observe changes to the owner after the actor has been created.

I have a persistent level and a streaming level the player starts in. Items are spawned for the player in the streaming level such that if you go to a specific location, the first streaming level is unloaded and the next one is loaded, and all all the items in the previous level will despawn appropriately.

The issue is that even after the player picks up the item (and a call is made to set the owner to the player) the item disappears when the streaming level it spawned from is unloaded. Even if I set the owner to null, the item is still unloaded (if you spawn an actor with no owner it never depawns). To me this indicates the level seems to cache the owner and fail to observe updates. I’m doing this all with BP currently.

Am I missing something? How do I get the behaviour I am looking for, where items not picked up would unload and items picked up would continue to exist.

Appreciate any help.

Hi HuntaKiller,

Yeah I had a similar problem - my cars were in streamed levels, if I jumped into one and drove around - it would dissapear and leave my camera floating in the level - took a while to work out what it was!

I just turn off “Spatially Loaded” when I enter the cars now - you should be able to do the same when you pick up the item.

Hmm that appears to be a UE5 only thing. Should have specified I am on the latest UE4

Yeah, UE5 only.

I’ve heard that it’s all about the owner and can be tricky - but never tried.

I get around that kind of thing by only spawning my pickups in a proximity radius (from a stored table of locations) so in a situation like yours the owner would be set correctly at creation…

Indeed, I am setting the correct owner at creation, which is the level or the actor in the level that creates the object. But that owner needs to change when the player attempts to bring one of these items to another level.