Removing default actors on Play

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hey, I’ve been working on games using C++ for a number of years, and more recently with Unity. I’ve decided to try out Unreal Engine and have been going through the tutorials to help guide me in making my first project in UE and I’m liking a lot of the features.

There is one thing that slightly bugs me though (which has probably been already covered in the forums and/or tutorials but I haven’t come across yet). I’ve created an empty C++ project and added in a sprite and camera (and have set it as my default camera in Blueprint) to setup my level. One thing I’ve noticed is that as soon as I hit play, a bunch of actors are created and added to the world outliner. These include a DefaultPawn, DefaultCamera, PlayerController etc. I’m wondering where can i configure or remove these? Since I already have a camera, it seems unnecessary to have another one created (or at the very least, where can I configure the default camera that is created, like it’s starting position etc).

Alternatively, is it possible to just create an empty scene where nothing is auto-generated for you (kinda like Unity) and you have to explicitly add them yourself?

Thanks and sorry if this has been already covered in a tutorial (if that is the case, a link to the tutorial would be much appreciated!).

2

I sounds you need to learn a little about UE4 framework. When you make a game you need to create your own GameMode class which main class controlling general gameplay, it has respawn system build in (together with PlayerController), in that class there varables which have default classes to use for Pawn, PlayerController, HUD class and so on and it set it up on game start. You can disable that by setting those variables (in Defaults) to None (or NULL/nullptr in C++). You also need to set defaults classes in Project Settings but if you use your own GameMode it will take defaults defined there

You should not disable PlayerController, this class is representing player (you got as many PlayerControllers as much as players oyu have) in the world and that class should control the pawn it also responsible for camera management (via CameraMenager class it initiate and manage), if you don’t use it you gonna have trouble using many engine features which work around Controllers (For Players and AI). You can cut down the rest, you can manage spawning on your own in GameMode, but GameMode and PlayerController is minimum

Here is docs about framework:

3

Hi , thank you for that excellent post, there is a lot of information there for me to work on! I’m slowly but surely wrapping my head around the development flow in UE :slight_smile: Thank you!