I am looking at the Player Spawn Pads and some of their settings. In particular, “Enabled During Phase” and “Use as Island Start”.
It seems like the Pads set to “Pre-Game Only” will only be used when you first spawn in the game.
And the Pads set to “Gameplay Only” will only be used when you respawn (such as after death).
If you don’t have a Pad valid for Pre-Game, then the player will spawn in the sky.
These “Enabled During Phase” settings make sense to me.
But now, what about “use as island start”? When I set Pads for Pre-Game and Pads for Gameplay, all of them with island start set to off, everything still works fine.
In what situation would someone NEED to use island start?
Use as Island Start is the pad a player uses when first spawning onto your island.
This does create a few problems for accommodating joining players while a game is running.
Using Enabled During Phase has had a few issues in the past, Pre-game phase will usually use pads assigned to island start, so if the Phase is set to pregame the joining players later on have no island start.
I usually use pregame spawnpads set to Enabled During Phase Always.
The Priority Group Setting is usefull, using a lower priority 2 on the pregame island start spawnpads, lets players first spawn in on them, then respawning on the game start and during games on the higher priority of 1 Gameplay Spawnpads.
When testing from a UEFN launched session, the spawning is not always as it will be in a private upload or published version.
Play mode testing doesn’t test for the pregame phase, so you will usually spawn in on island start spawnpads instead of gameplay spawnpads as the game countdown starts, requiring a respawn or a teleport to get to game start area.