After a few hours fiddling with a storage system which I’d prefer to write in BP only. Now currently I have two real options:
Use Structs only to store all the data.
Use an Actor which still is an object inside of the level.
However I am really missing the option to just create an object. Preferably with all variables as input pins but actually just the ability to spawn it would be great!
Structs are certainly no way to go. They don’t support recursion, one can’t compare them with one another and probably worst you can’t just change single variables but always have to either break the whole thing and make a new one or use the “Set members” which isn’t really better. So far I think it’s fairly obvious why I don’t want to use those.
Now actors are actually better but still come with stuff I don’t really want. They clutter the world outliner (in my case I generate them on construct. This is necessary to prevent a huge overhead as I’m first checking if that object doesn’t exist yet. However this means I have a few dozen to a hundred actors with no purpose in the level which I can’t automatically put into a sub folder… and have fun doing this manually for each change) and come with an overhead of functionality I really seriously don’t need.
EDIT: Also you can’t take actors with you from level to level. The variables have to be saved manually which is exactly what I want to avoid.
So it’d be great to have Objects themselves available to spawn / create as they exactly suite my needs.
That’s basically just an actor. Well what I meant with actor. The thing is why are Objects not supported? Yes some actor works as well (I will have to create my own since right now I want to use it as storage mechanism so there have to be some variables in there) but it’s still inside of the level. You can’t dynamically create Actor Components (which wouldn’t be ideal but better) nor objects so I’m still stuck with the issue that I have that ridiculously cluttered world outliner (as I said. In a small demo level I made it’s like 10 objects which is already annoying to sort into a folder but in practice it will probably be closer to a hundred or more per level).
And a lot worse: You can’t really take actors with you from level to level. All you save is a reference to that actor. Once in a new level every data is lost. You have to save it manually. Every single variable.
Thank you for your idea on how to improve UE4. I have submitted your feature request to our developers. If you need to reference this feature request in the future, please reference: UE-11946.
