Why does replace actor take so long

When ever I use replace actor to replace a blueprint by selecting all the actors of one blueprint and right click-> Replace actor with another blueprint. It practically take forever.

Admittedly I’m trying to replace around say 1000 actors But for the time and memory it take to do it I could probably do all by hand faster.

It doesn’t crash or anything like that it just takes forever!

I can’t possibly see why it should take so long. I’m not running a 55mhz processor with 64mb of ram or nothing!

Hi JoSilver,

This seems like a more unique case as we don’t generally perform this operation with this many actors. Would you be willing to send us your project?

You can upload it to any filesharing site (Drive, Dropbox, etc) and then PM me the link on the forums.

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Hi JoSilver,

We have not heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you are still experiencing the issue you reported, please respond to this message with additional information and we will offer further assistance.

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I’m sorry for not responding sooner, I put that project aside to work on something else for now. I’ve completely forgotten about this post.

Just the give a brief description of what I’m doing. I was reverse engineering minecraft and my first task was to replicate the lighting system which has gone really well so far. With that said there is no sort of procedural generation of the map of any kind yet so I’ve been placing down block in the editor and when ever I added in a new block and want to add a new block to replace some old one I’d select all of them and then replace actor. However this does mean I might have to replace possibly 500+ actors at a time and it comes to a crawl with anything above 10.

I’m sure I’m unaware of the underlying mechanisms of replacing actors but I can’t possibly see why it should take so long. Seems like an N-time problem to me.

Hey JoSilver,

So I just tested this issue on my end and was seeing some type of slowing when replacing a handful of actors, but this was in high numbers. To me this behavior is expected as replacing static meshes with another asset type takes various calculations on the editors side to be done accurately.

The speed in which this happens depends on the number of the meshes, the change in asset type, and their relative locations. This will also depend on the processor and amount of RAM you have on your machine as you are transferring large amounts of data at once.

I would advise against replacing 500+ actors at once as this is a large amount of actors to change all at once. If you would like I can further investigate on how the replace actor functions? Would you mind providing me with your systems ‘dxdiag’ so I can take a look at your computers specifications.

Thank you,

Sure I’d love to help out but how would I go about doing that? I’m not sure what this whole ‘dxdiag’ is.

However I hope that future version can be more efficient, sure it’s not common so someone to need to do that but I guess I’m proof someone may need to do that.

Hey JoSilver,

The typical workflow when replacing assets in the editor is to do only a handful at a time. Anyway, your dxdiag stands for your DirectX Diagnostics report which provides us detailed information about the DirectX component and drivers installed on your system.

Simply open the ‘Run’ windows application and type ‘dxdiag’ in the empty space. This will open your report which you can save to a .txt file and attach it here in your response.

Let me know if you are having troubles or if you need further assistance.

Cheers,

All right, Attached the text file. hope it helps.

But just a small suggestion shouldn’t the editor internally handle replacing actors in a similar fashion then. If you have to do it a few at a time then it should do a couple then update the level, do a couple more and then update the level and so on.

link text

Hey JoSilver,

It is safer for the user to to replace in smaller numbers and more iterations sometimes, as some of the actors being replaced might not all be the same. There is also the chance that you might have accidentally made a mistake, and it is safer to undo a smaller number of changes, than a large one.

With that said, I am sure the replace actor option has a heuristic in which it follows when replacing actors within the level. I took a look at your system, and the issue could lie with your GPU. Your card is not bad by any means, but it sits at a mid range. For a few visual comparisions of your cards performance you can check out the sites below.

http://gpuboss.com/graphics-card/GeForce-GT-530

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?gpu=GeForce+GT+530

You could also try increasing the amount of RAM you have in your computer from 8GB to 16GB.

If you have any other questions please let me know.

Thank you,