UnrealEngine

Hello! Today I wanted to talk a little bit about casting, primarily Blueprint casting. The main reason I wanted to bring this up is because it’s one of the most misunderstood and blown-out-of-proportion concepts in Unreal Engine. There’s no shortage of YouTube videos with clickbait titles like “Casting is so bad, NEVER use it in your games!” (or some variation of that). This highlights a larger problem: people creating tutorials when they have no business doing so. But I digress.

Soft references are a way to reference an object in Unreal Engine without forcing it to stay in memory. This can be incredibly useful in scenarios where you need to reference assets like textures, sounds, or even entire levels, but don’t want to load them into memory until absolutely necessary.

Unreal Engine provides various templated object pointer types that help manage memory and references to UObject instances in a safe and efficient manner. These templated types are vital for ensuring the stability and performance of your Unreal Engine projects. In this post, we’ll explore the most common templated object pointer types, explain what they do, and discuss when to use them.

Unreal Engine’s TArray is a powerful and flexible container that allows you to manage dynamic arrays in your code. One of its lesser-known yet incredibly useful features is the ability to specify custom allocators. These allocators determine how the memory for the array is allocated and managed, which can have a significant impact on performance, especially in memory-constrained environments.

You’ve probably heard the argument before: “C++ is better than Blueprint.” Often, this comes from people who are new to using C++ in Unreal Engine and are riding the peak of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Buffers are simply containers of bytes that can store raw data using memory offsets. Understanding how to effectively manage these buffers is essential for tasks like serialization, deserialization, and data storage.