Hi sorry if it is a noobie question, but i have a scenario, with which i need some help. I have an inventory system with big number of items, and they can be dropped, if dropped, they have a mesh with which i can pick it up.
The question is the following: how much space a static/skeletal mesh component takes in an actor? and which of the following scenarios i came up with would you choose or else?
make a separate actor that holds the mesh and spawn it when the item is dropped and that would contain the mesh.
item has the mesh and hide it if it is in the inventory.
item has the mesh but somehow create and destroy the mesh on drop/pickup(unsure how tho).
with the first case the problem obvoiusly is that it separates the data,with the others im unsure about the sizes in memory eg on 50k items could it be a problem?
Hey there, in my game i opted for my items to have a skeletal mesh (some of the items you can equip into the players hands like weapons or so) and i just enable/disable collisions and visibility. In my case it works because the player can have a limited number of items because they are organized in a diablo like inventory. With that said, if you think in your game your character can hold a lot of items (im not including stacking, in that case i just increase the quantity of an existing item and delete the picked up) then maybe it would be a good idea to do a pickup blueprint (like in unreal tournament) and store just the info in the array of items without having any actor /component involved.
yes im doing that atm(pickups), but its not so convinient to make a lot of pickups, for it will have a lot of items. A lot or armor slots too.
Im thinking about your solution for a while, also its multiplayer so for enabling disabling things im thinking about a bool replication and then an event run on clients that will handle the things so that will obviously have costs.
but the core of the question is with that solution, if i turn collision/visibility off, what resources the instances of the mesh will use?
I think ill use profiler or something to find out what it consumes.
If they are invisible and with the collision off i think it wont be as bad because he doesnt process it gor most of the calculations, although replication might still be a problem because it still needs to update it. Unless you disable replication while its invisible and reenable when its visible.