not UE 4.23 Preview. UE 4.23 is not listed.
Anyway, I would like to create a hierarchy of components without an actor. The component would be spawned at runtime and attached to a specified actor that already exists. Is it not possible to create a component using the viewport in the same way that Actors are created? Why not?
Not sure why you trying to do this but why not just do an actor with the components and then do detach and then attach to another actor’s component?
Components can’t be independent hence why they are named components. Components can be spawned at runtime or attached to any Actor in the level.
You can use any actor as a component just spawn it as a child or attach it to whatever you like.
I really do not see a purpose of this. You can much better have the components installed on the actors that might need them. and then trigger them when needed.
I don’t want the component to be independent. I want to spawn the component at runtime on an actor.
I thought about doing that but I want to avoid the overhead of creating and destroying an actor when it’s not needed.
I’m trying to avoid the overhead of unneeded actors.
This doesn’t work when there are an unknown number of components that need to be spawned in an unknown configuration at runtime.
First, you can have one public actor in the level that does that and you can spawn components on runtime for actors so again I don’t know what are you trying to do…
“you can have one public actor in the level that does that”
Spawning single components at runtime is easy as long as they they aren’t expected to also have child components.
With an actor, you have a viewport and component list where you can easily add additional components under the root component. Where an actor is spawned in the world, the root components are automatically created and attached. I need to create a component that has child components that can be created at runtime and attached to any actor of my choosing.
Now, I could use BeginPlay on a component blueprint to spawn it’s child components and set all my values. Or I can create an actor and just attach it as a child actor component. I want to avoid creating actors that aren’t needed but using BeginPlay and setting all values will be very tedious. So that leaves me with either a very tedious process or process that adds unnecessary overhead.
EDIT:
“…I can create an actor and just attach it as a child actor component…”
but because I don’t actually need the actor at this point, I might as well transfer the component to the desired actor, still adding unwanted overhead.
I see so you just gave a solution to your own problem but don’t want to do it because it’s too tedious welp this is a comment that you should have asked as [DEVS] or something because everyone here is trying to help you with the problem, when what you want is a new Plugin or some update for the component with a viewport. Good luck with that mate…
I wasn’t sure it wasn’t actually possible until I did another few hours of research into it last night. but even so, this video is 4 years old so I was hoping that it would have been something that would have been implemented since then. It seems like it would be an extremely powerful feature for games that focus on user generated content or even proc gen games. But it doesn’t sound like it’s a thing, yet. Thanks for the well wishes!