In my tests, the mesh disappeared based on the proximity. If the player respawned / died near the mesh, it stays, but if it happened at longer distance to that mesh, it disappeared.
We know that pre-placed entities (prefab or normal) should never distance cull. That’s been shared by an Epic staff here on the forums and I personally rely my project on that for my Mega Grants project.
Here are two scenarios that can be reliably reproduced in-game.
Preparation:
place a prefab with a mesh in the editor
start the session
A)
face the camera to the entity mesh and fly away from it while looking at it
at 1000+ meters it will cull
fly back to it while never facing away the camera, it will re-appear nearby
B) [Does not always happen, but works some times]
face the camera to the entity mesh and fly away from it while looking at it
at 1000+ meters it will cull
face away the camera after it culled for a short time (similar to when the player re-spawns far away)
fly back to it, it will NOT re-appear anymore (potentially for the rest of the game)
Someone figured out a temporary workaround for entities that really need a quick patch in the meantime.
If you have an @editable reference to an entity / prefab set in your editor maintained entity components, it will still distance cull, but it won’t disappear when the player comes back to it, even after respawning.
To collect a list of references such as for @editable List: []entity I created a little HTML tool that parses copied entity list from the outliner. You are required to fill the string_to_insert with the correct level reference (including a trailing dot) to make the generated lists have a valid format.
DISCLAIMER:
I will not provide support for this tool nor do I guarantee any future maintenance of that tool. Anyone is free to copy and fix it for their needs as it might not handle every edge case.
Thanks that was me, I was waiting for more people to test it before sharing more widely but here we go haha. It says my video is too big to upload but it seems when you add an entity as an editable it somehow forces it to stay rendered. Thank you for making the tool to make it easier to make my array!