Trello: So there will be no PreFabs / BluFabs? :(

[Cpt.Kittens]

@;369671

No, you can’t. You can only attach child actors and set their class to another blueprint. But this way, you can’t configure the child blueprint as you could do in the level editor (change it’s class defaults). The settings are simply not shown at edit time.

You will have to do that per code manually. You also can’t use blueprint-scripts/-components for that, because they can’t react to input events and it’s not possible to add components to them.

A small example: Think about an animated, configureable text, let’s call it ‘BP_textHint’. You can change it’s color, text and animation speed via public variables in the editor. But currently, you can’t use it as component in another Blueprint. You have to use a child actor and then you have to configure every instance of it in the parent’s construction script by hand. You can’t also directly reference it. Instead you will have to reference the child actor, read it’s value and cast it manually to the desired class type each time.

In other words: You currently need C++ to define custom components which you can add to blueprints.

Or you can do the smart thing and store a pointer to the actual blueprint child, which lets you access everything without having to cast it.

I get where you’re going, and I assume you were a Unity dev once. So you know the value of a prefab, but my own views say that it’s not a feature that should be high up there in terms of priority for UE4.
That’s just my view mate Not shooting down your idea, I just can’t see an immediate use as I’ve not been limited in what I can do with Blueprints.