OMG THANK YOU FOR YOUR VIDEO. After 9 years of developing on Unity I started learning Unreal Engine and that's the first thing I noticed. It doesn't like having a "King Bucket."
Nifty. I have been experimenting with Unreal, after many years in Unity. And I do not really understand how to achieve a hierarchical composition of objects in Unreal. So this is very helpful.
Dude! What have u done is just so brain soothing. The reason people can't adapt unreal from unity because the first mistake they do is "Every actor is like gameobject" and then they expect actor to be work like gameobject. After someday, they say unreal sucks. funny.
I feel like this is an area that Unity does much better than Unreal. In Unity, for the most part you can just attach things to things and they work. Have a space ship hull? Attach an engine. Need rockets in the engine, that are fully functional things (code, meshes, etc)? Just attach them to the engine. Need lights /flame thingies attached to the rockets? Just do it. Unreal could definitely use simplification and optimization here.
Thank you for the explanation, no one is talking about fundamentals like this! Now the question is: How to do like unity but the correct way in unreal ? How do you construct actor with other actor interacting with each others ? Simple example; I got a "door" actor (with 2 mesh & a physics constrain) and I want an alternative version with a lock on it that you can break. Naively, I would create the "lock" as an actor (which you can break) and then try to create a new actor "Locked door" with both door actor & lock as children. Obviously it is not working. What's the correct way of doing this ? It's a pretty fundamental example, but I can't get my head around it.
Normally you'd create a "door" actor, then descend from it for a "locked door", and just add the locking code in the new blueprint. ... I mean, assuming you don't want every door to be at least theoretically lockable, in which case you can skip the "door" actor step.
It really depends on what you want your item to do inside the object/bucket. Say you're making a kerbal space program like rocket, you'd want your pieces to be actors as you can assign behavior to them. If you're just looking to build a prefab/group, then mesh component inside a bp is what you need. Functionally it's all the same, it just depends how you'd like to categorize ur pieces. Everything is a actor in Unreal. They just have different fancy subnames. I love ur writing series! thanks for sharing.
Did you get past this? There is a pretty fundamental misunderstanding here with what an Actor is, adding multiple meshes to an actor and more. Hope you're doing better getting used to Unreal Engine
Thanks for the explanation. I try to convert to Unreal but I find it very difficult. The thing that is bothering me is that the editor of the actors is a pain to use. I have a situation where I have a ship with hundred of elements. The placement of all those things is really tedious, where in Unity, creating and "world building" my objects is the same between a scene a a prefab editor. In Unreal, it's not at all the same thing. Let's say I want to create a fence generator for my ship, i can use it in a level, but i cannot use it in the actor editor. Mean I have to place and snap hundreds of fence instances by hand one by one (or I just didn't found how in a non-destructive way). As it's a personal project for visual purposes only, I went by merging all my objets and instances into a single giga mesh in Blender (and doing my ship world building and construciton in Blender). But I would like to know how am I supposed to do for a real game. As using the actor editor is just painfull work from my understanding of it.
UE want you to construct your assets in a third party software. You could add sockets, bones, and custom collisions in Blender and import them into UE. If you really really want to edit your mesh in UE editor or at runtime, you could try procedural mesh or dynamic mesh (might require you to enable a plugin). If that fence of yours is not procedurally generated at runtime, I would just merge them into one object in blender and give it custom collisions and maybe also give the ship mesh a socket so I could attach it accurately.
Unity GO can be nothing, or you can build an entire game inside a GO, it is a dynamic bucket with infinite nesting of dynamic buckets. Video tells me they is no equivalent to a GO, but doesn't explain what was put in it's place. UE components have limitations that need scoping for me to mentally build a hierarchy of usage. For example: UE has a scene, and a scene has two types possible of objects in it: Actors, and Scene Components. Actors are used if _____________ and SceneComponents are used if __________________. Because after your video, I don't know if a static tree is one or the other (Im guessing its a SC with nested SC leaves). I also don't know if an edible tree now has to be an actor ( Can a SC contain actors ( leaves) which can be eaten, requiring a BP)? What is a UI button? What is terrain? Can actors and scene components both be object pooled, reusable prefabs or must those be an actors? So many questions still, what a journey this will be, lol.
It's fine to not know where the borders are: the point is to establish it as something to be aware of. Some folks find using extensively nested Actors works for them.
I like to think of actors as things that live in the world and a way to aggregate the functionality of components attached. Actor components are akin to Monobehaviours in Unity. It's not a direct comparison.
