Cannot posses child pawn

I’m trying to setup a blueprint hierarchy so that I can then create multi-crewed vehicles. A ship where 1 player can drive and another controls a turret. I make a “hull” Blueprint, with parent class of “Pawn” and another blueprint for a gun turret also using Pawn as its parent class.

On their own, placed into the editor, I can posses them just fine and my input handling is all working perfectly.

Now I want to make the Turrent blueprint a child within the Hull blueprint, I add the ChildActor component, select my Turret blueprint, but now when it comes to possessing it, nothing works.

Instead the camera just switches to a 0,0,0 point in the map with default rotation and nada in terms of behaviour. I’m also not able to access the ChildActor member variables and methods in a standard manner which is a bit annoying really… seems I’m either not understanding the purpose of this ChildActor component or its completely borked.

Can someone please point me in the right direction so that I can have a multi-crewed vehicle as described above?

Ok, seems as though they’ve made changes in the latest patch (4.3.0) where the Child Actor no longer shows up in the Scene Outliner while editing… so now I’m even further back… yay.

So even if I were able to get a reference to the now dynamically spawned Child Pawn, I’d only be back where I started. ffs!!! I switched to UE4 over Unity because of this very reason!!! Are there no tools out there that can properly handle object hierarchies!!!

/rant

Have your tried spawning your Turret at runtime and attaching it, then trying to possess? ChildActor component seems a little wonky so i wondered if this approach would avoid any issues it may have.

I haven’t tried that but I did try something a little simpler. I dropped both Pawns into the scene in the editor. I then created the attachment in the Level Blueprint between the Turret and the Hull triggered by the BeginPlay event. I was able to posses both Pawns but the turret remained stationary whilst piloting the hull.

I thought maybe I’d configured the Attach node wrong but I tried every available permutation to configure it but still got the same behaviour every time.

I’m getting the feeling my initial attempt didn’t work because the child actors only get spawned at runtime. Having set the reference to the child pawn up in the editor may essentially have created a reference to a temporary actor that ceased to exist when the simulation started?

Update: Came across this on the roadmap - Trello
Looks like I’m going top have to wait for this to be properly implemented.

Haven’t been on here in a while.

Your suggestion worked by the way. Though i wasn’t seeing it properly as the Pawn I was spawning was initially set the static hence it not properly attaching.