Hi there Bob_Gneu! Great to having you around!
Yes I agree with Bob, you really should not be serializing an entire actor, why would you need to?
You really only need the special properties that you create that are different for your different items, and are the core values that you are watching as part of your gameplay mechanics.
Personally I save mesh and material asset references to hard disk via FName.
I’ve publically posted how you can do this here!
Wiki Tutorial on Dynamic Load Object
You simply save the asset path to hard disk and then can load it at runtime!
Please note you should be dynamically obtaining the asset reference, for use with a packaged game, not relying on the editor’s path.
Alternatively you make blueprints of your different items with their various settings, and save only the values that change as the item interacts with the player and the game world.
For that you'd use my SpawnBP node, and then apply your saved properties/variables that you serialized to hard disk.
**Wiki tutorial on Spawning BP in C++**
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Templates_in_C%2B%2B#Spawn_Actor_From_Blueprint
The real usefulness of using my C++ binary save system is that you can save literally any data you want, including your own custom C++ data types!
Again my favorite example is how I save in-game screenshots as arrays of FColor to binary file, and then load them as UTexture2D to give every save game in Solus a related screenshot!
