Hi all
I am building a chemistry simulation engine in unreal engine 5.
For this I store a lot of actor references in other actors as they work a containers for running simulations etc.
For example i have a simulation container that keeps track of all atoms within a certian volume. I then use these stored references to get properties and do other complex physics related simulations.
Until now, i have only been using hard references to store actor references, which has made my game very heavy for simulating molecules with many atoms. I recently stumbled upon the concept of soft references and it seems like it might fix some of my performance issues. But i want to make sure that i understand the concept correctly before i startet using soft references instead of hard references.
Is it true that if I have my actor (for example: an atom) spawned in the game, and i wish to store a reference to that in my simulation container, using soft references is much better than hard references? Especially because it is already in game.
Thank you