General Blueprint Efficiency Questions

Been a lurker on here for awhile, and very happy that the community for Unreal is so bustling and helpful. I’ve been able to get nearly all my issues and questions solved through here, and after about 4 months of development on my project I have a working prototype. I’m in the process of rebuilding it, knowing now much more about how to do things properly. Being a non-coder, I’ve built everything in blueprints and have some general questions about efficiency when working with Blueprints.

  1. Is it expensive to have a very large blueprint, even though most of it is not being called regularly? As in using many pages of graphs as opposed to using multiple blueprints and communicating between them. I notice it does slow down the editor, but wonder how much it may/may not slow down runtime play.

  2. Behavior Tree vs Blueprints; is there any specific difference in efficiency when using either to control ~50 AI at any given time? I know this will vary a lot based on the application, but with generic melee combat between say, two sides in a battle, would there be a significant gain/loss in using either compared to the other?

  3. Is there any way to adjust tick rates? Such as reducing ticks to something greater than every frame, such as every 30 frames or so.

  4. Minimizing scripts that are called every frame is a great way to reduce costs, but are there any specific nodes that are considered quite heavy and should be avoided if at all possible? (Get All Actors of Class is one, as is my understanding)

  5. When using a Pawn rather than a Character, is it possible to restrict the Pawn’s movement to the navmesh (similar to walking), rather than use floating pawn movement? And is doing so less efficient, forcing line traces in order to achieve it?

  6. Is there a way to determine an individual Blueprint’s runtime costs, to keep track of optimization?

Thanks in advance, hopefully the answers will help beginners develop good habits when producing blueprints as well.

The best answer is to check out your performance through Profiler. This will give you a great idea of where your game is slowing down, which blueprints are responsible for performance decreases, so on and so forth.