SOFT Object References in Unreal Engine EXPLAINED 

i'm glad to hear that! :D

Glad to have helped out!!

I wouldn’t say that’s easy, if you want to load one of a few possible assets you can just pass in a soft obj ref variable instead

Glad it was helpful!

actually am planning to release a video about this very thing soon, in short : yes if you know something will be loaded anyway, there's no real harm in making a hard reference

А есть у вас опыт с подгрузкой data asset? И имеет ли смысл data asset и soft reference? 3) у меня есть spawn enemy actor и он спавнит противников в зависимости от растояния до игрока, использую world partitional и soft reference на mesh противников что бы перед добавлением их на уровень я вызываю async load mesh и назначаю противнику а когда уходу на дальнее растояние я использую destroy actor для противника, при destroy actor все же выгружается из памяти? 4) как еще можно отслеживать сколько памяти используется? У меня проблема в том что даже используя почти пустой уровень я замечаю иногда на 1 секунду просадку фпс с 60 до 40 и это заметно, не могу понять почему это происходит, в source map все вроде достаточно нормально

Возможно ли с вами как то связаться что бы задать пару вопросов по async load и оптимизации?

top left there's a little settings menu that allows you to set how deep on both sides it should show the connections

For sure could! it's a bit of a puzzle on a case by case bases which assets you make hard and which you make soft references. in this case, instead of loading every animation through a soft reference like I do in the video, what would make more sense is to have the abilities themselves be soft references on the weapon that load on when the weapon it equipped. then the animations inside the abilities can still be hard references which will get loaded in and out with the weapon as a whole since the abilities would be soft references!

PERFECT! Your approach makes much more sense than mine (montages). The tools are there with UE5, its really about nailing the logic of using them. Thanks again! @@thegamedevcave

the sequence node doesn't really do anything other than allow you to more neatly organize your nodes really. So if anything, for just putting all your Asynch loads in the first output of the sequence will help you get organized but the sequence node won't wait until those async tasks finish to move on (that's the whole point of an async task after all, you start it up and it completes in the background while the rest of your code keeps running) As far as loading multiple assets, i believe c++ has some way to do that which has a callback for when all assets in an array have finished loading but I haven't much looked into that as i've never really ran into needing to load in more than a handfull of soft references at a time.

always good to try and to things like that if you can! but frankly, for the most part this kind of headache isn't worth the effort for animations because they're so small in size anyway, it's more relevant when you have references to assets like meshes and materials or whole other types of actors that you try to use soft references when you can. The animations in this video were mostly for demonstration purposes :)

@@thegamedevcaveThanks, yeah I did wonder. Maybe I'm trying to optimise the wrong thing. Cheers.

Assets referenced in an object will be removed from memory whenever that object is destroyed. Unreal's garbage collection takes care of any Uobject that is loaded but not referened anymore. As for lag, thats why you load these things async, its being loaded on a seperate thread so your game doesnt stutter, you just need to make sure that the code on your game thread doesnt try to use that asset before it gets fully loaded.

Откуда такая информация? Вы сами придумали или есть доказательства?

you can! but the reason I dont do that is because it makes a lot of ugly confusing looking lines all over your blueprint. and you can't promote it to a variable because then you are making a hard reference again which makes the whole soft obejct reference and async loading obsolete. so just loading it and then using the soft reference variable is the cleanest way to do things and shouldn't give any issues if you make sure that by the time you use the reference it's actually loaded it (which also goes for if you were to use the output value from the async load node)

Good Point@@thegamedevcave

it's a matter of choosing the most efficient points to turn into soft objects. you could turn all your asset references soft but that then ends up with having to manually load in a LOT of assets (like in this video). Instead, if we take my example in this video, what would be a better way to do it is to make the gameplay abilty itself a soft reference, that way it, and all the hard references (which includes meshes, particles and material) in it get loaded in when I want. so when the ability becomes possible to use, i async load it, while all the abilities that aren't possible to use at any given time won't be loaded, but i'll still have references to them. For another random exmaple. say you'remaking a pokemon game. You can have a soft reference to your pokemon class so you have a simple variable to acces it through on the player (or player controller more likely) but you only load that in when the actual pokemon is spawned into the world

The issue is that hard references will ALWAYS keep the asset they’re referencing in memory, even if no object that uses them exists. So if you have a blueprint that has a hard reference to another blueprint that only appears in certain situations (like a specific level, only a handful of times in the game), it will now always be around in memory regardless of an object of that type actually exists. If you’re making a small game, that’s probably fine but this issue scales up pretty quickly… before you know it you’ve hard referenced so many things in so many different blueprints, you now have half the assets in your game loaded at all times, making your game use dozens of GB of ram.

there isn't a way in blueprint to unload manually. when the object that loaded in the asset is destroyed it'll free up the memory again and otherwise unreal's garbage collection will also try it's best to unload once it think you are no longer using those assets. Manually unloading is a c++ only thing and for the most part not something you usually need to worry about.

@@thegamedevcave I am playing different animation montage again and again around 100 Anim 100 times using soft reference and load asset method called , how to profile this to check memory stack and not causing issue?

just load them in when they are relevant, they should just get taken care off

U can use collect garbage node to force collection in blueprints It states it should only be done when a hang is acceptable.

I got a video all about casting coming soon, why and when it is bad but also when it is fine to do.