Editor Memory References on Delete

Furinyx
Sat, 25 Mar 2017 11:17:00 +0000
Asset Creation

I don’t know if Epic will consider this to be a bug per-say, rather than a design choice, but the annoyance of it has compounded over the years that I felt it was worth raising to improve user experience and productivity.

Opening an asset in the Editor (whether it opens the Skeletal Editor, Blueprint Editor, Mesh Editor, etc) causes memory reference caching - as expected. Closing the editor window usually doesn’t clean up the reference straight away - this is also what I’d expect; it makes sense to cache for faster re-opening and/or for garbage collection reasons.

My issue is, since UE4 went public in 2014, trying to delete an asset cleanly (without using ‘Force Delete’) generally results in complaints about memory references. This can even happen after import without opening any of the freshly imported assets. While you can sometimes wait a bit for garbage collection to remove any old references, I’ve had times where it has retained memory references for extremely long periods of time without any apparent reason.

Is there not a simple means where the Editor can confirm that the asset has a reference cached without anything actually currently using the reference (surely it has a flag for clean-up priority)? This way, it could allow a ‘Delete’ approach without mentioning the memory references as a conflict issue with delete, where deleting the asset will trigger manual garbage collection so as to clean up the cached references before actually deleting them.

Generally, whenever I delete anything from a project, I almost always end up restarting the Editor so that it will allow me to cleanly delete. While I’m not deleting assets on a regular basis, it happens often enough that it irritates me. I realise I can use ‘Force Delete’ but, to stay on the safe side, I’d rather not get in the habit of doing that so as to avoid an accidental case of doing it when it would cause problems to do so.

17 posts - 14 participants