So I placed a Bush foliage in my WP map. When I click on the foliage actor in the Outliner, in the details panel, it shows not only the newly placed bush actor component but also the previously placed actor components which I erased prior placing the bush.
The actor instancing works with a pool of items that are the basis for instances, and a pool of actual instances.
The system doesn’t delete items that were added in from the general pool of items on its own afaik.
You should be Ok to delete those.
The best approach would probably be to set up a custom event on when you edit instances to manage the pool of objects a little better… but in reality leaving stuff in there wont cause issues until you force delete a mesh or something similar.
I have a harvesting system. That needs to iterate over them. That’s where my concern is.
The others will just be empty FoliageActors - no instances in their HISMCs. (There is one per world partition).
You wont be able to get the engine to iterate over much of anything in blueprint.
From c++ maybe.
Still not ideal.
Your harvesting system may need some tinkering or rethinking.
I say this as someone who has created several foliage responsivness sytems (DynoFoliage: UE4 Interactive Foliage).
The engine isn’t one bit friendly to loops.
Matter of fact, the only way you are really going to get something going is going to have to be via a custom thread and async calls…
I would suggest looking those up before even worrying about instances and what the engine does with them.