Since 4.7 it’s possible to add actors as child components even without using a blueprint (which is GREAT).
I wonder if it would be possible to convert instanced actors from the scene directly to components of another actor.
Something like clicking right on the selected actors and choosing ‘attach as component…’ and then selecting the desired destination actor/blueprint.
The cool thing would be, that the scale and the (relative) location could be maintained. Currently I have to rebuild them manually inside the viewport of the blueprint. which can be very time consuming.
We’re planning to iterate on the actor/component workflow some more. Though to clarify, in 4.7 you’re not adding actors directly as children of components in the components view, you’re adding components only (except for child actor component, which does magic to attach an actor). Unfortunately APointLight differs from UPointLightComponent. They have slightly different functions you can call on them, so they can’t be a 1:1 replacement, or if you’ve referenced them in the level script those sorts of references would likely need to be broken.
That being said, we do want to remove that inconsistency and friction between the actors that are more or less just wrappers for a single primitive component, Lights, StaticMeshes…etc.
But then there are complex actors that we’ll need a better plan for long term, like the APlayerStart actor. Would be nice if there was just a player start component you could put on anything.
Yeah, I must say all this is very confusing ATM. Generally like the idea of Unity-like components/prefabs but in UE4 all this seems very complicated.