What is most efficient in building power line cables

Development World Creation
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I’m not a modeler or a world builder but I’m filling in where I can since the programming is pretty much complete. I’m building one of our levels and grabbing assets where I can at least as stand ins until the real modeler has time to work with it (that is, I’m roughing in levels to get them to 80% or so).

I pulled in a couple of types of power poles from the MegaPak and was going to wire them after making consistent end points. I tried the cable component and decided that’s really not worth the effort to set up, the actor->component->socket didn’t seem to work and I decided it was too much hassle. It could be that on 5.0.3 it’s not ready for prime time because it’s end position didn’t match anything up. I also noted that the MegaPak had set up their cables to use splines. I opted for a quick static mesh of a hanging wire since I could match ends perfectly as long as the distance between poles and connections points were consistent. It made sense to me that this would be the most efficient and that there was no need for physics on this application. It’s a night scene industrial area and the poles and cables are just ambience.

My question is, which are most efficient in terms of game play and avoiding bad frame rates. Cable Component, Spline Component or simplistic non-physics static meshes of a wire in a suspended appearance?

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Hey there @eagletree! In my opinion for wires that are going to be a good distance from the player, not going to be able to be touched, and are completely uniform I’d recommend the simplest method which is having a SM with the image of the wires should be the most efficient. The next case would be the spline if you ever need to do anything with them, they need variable lengths, sway or anything.

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Thank you. That is in keeping with what I presumed but wanted to verify. Yes, it’s a night level, on the ground, the wires are almost unseeable and not touchable. It’s an industrial district with buildings blocking weather elements like wind so zero interaction of the wires to the environment.

Please pass on to your management that it’s very helpful that Epic now has folks like yourself helping us out. I see a big difference in the usefulness of the forums these past few months and that is a large factor.

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