Hi, Cicisse. I think I touched on this in the stream, but just in case I missed something, let’s go through some reasons we used actors instead of components.
We did actually discuss using components, but for this situation, we didn’t think it was the easiest or best way. For one thing, Blueprints are spawned as actors with hierarchies of components attached, but not as hierarchies of components with no actor. We also thought that using Blueprints and the Blueprint editor would be convenient. Since we have multiple components in our turret, and some turrets may have more components than others, and there’s the possibility of having an artist design some flashier turrets, having an actor spawned from a Blueprint class is what we felt was the way to go. On top of that, while we could override component classes to have different behaviors, such as aiming or firing differently, some of those behaviors would involve controlling multiple different components, and we felt that it would be easier to make each turret its own actor with full knowledge and control of its own components. Note that it’s still possible to do all of this with components, we just didn’t feel it was the easiest or best way, especially given how useful the Blueprint editor can be, especially for artists, as we move beyond the most basic turret types.