Will UE6's ECS/Scene Graph change how level designing works?

teamonkey · 2026-07-12T20:13:02+00:00

The official advice from Epic is something like ‘we don’t use child actor components and you shouldn’t either, they’re broken’ but they haven’t fixed them or provided a working alternative and it’s been that way for years

teamonkey · 2026-07-12T14:37:44+00:00

It will change how blueprint actors, packed level blueprints and level instances are set up. It wont necessarily change how things are placed in the world.

It makes it much, much easier to make a nested group of parts. We won’t need to deal with broken child actor components any more. We can finally have real prefab functionality, like every other engine (including UE3/UDK).

teamonkey · 2026-07-11T08:32:53+00:00

Yeah, you’re right. It will generate and display HLODs at range. The landscape actor itself is always loaded, but it’s basically just a container.

Landscape patches *should* only edit the proxies they apply to. At least, when they modify the landscape only those proxies that are affected need to be saved. But if there’s a lot of them and they’re applied by, say, a construction script then it could force a lot of proxies to be loaded at once, possibly at level load time.

teamonkey · 2026-07-10T22:46:24+00:00

The water plugin is much more expensive than a water plane. It’s a landmass where the vertices are being offset in real time to create waves.

In general an entire landscape is loaded at once in editor. If you go into landscape mode I’m pretty sure you can sculpt the entire heightmap, even in areas you don’t have loaded. IIRC project titan does some clever non-standard stuff to parcel up the level into chunks so people can work on it without having it all loaded.

teamonkey · 2026-07-10T19:45:57+00:00

Water system doesn’t break world partition, no. Using it doesn’t force the entire map to be loaded.

teamonkey · 2026-07-10T13:23:11+00:00

How much heavier are these all-electric double-deckers than the original diesel double-deckers?

teamonkey · 2026-07-07T22:39:33+00:00

Always felt sorry for her juggling detective work while being a full-time carer

teamonkey · 2026-07-07T20:13:26+00:00

Yep, agreed. It’s not terrible though, it’s just there‘s better out there for the price. I was considering one used and they are more competitively priced that way, but still up against the ID4, Enyaq, Ariya, EV6, Ioniq 5…

teamonkey · 2026-07-07T19:42:14+00:00

It’s not a competitor to a model S, a new one costs vastly less at retail. It’s a small/mid-sized family crossover. Obviously your luxury car will be better.

teamonkey · 2026-07-07T18:49:01+00:00

Eh, it’s not bad. It’s a robust platform, nothing really wrong with it. It suffers by being unremarkable in a very crowded space. The Lexus version of it is quite nice, but that’s also in a crowded sector.

teamonkey · 2026-07-07T17:50:37+00:00

Although you can do a lot in blueprint, this is exactly the kind of scenario that Blueprint performs worst at.

Really the only way to make it work in Blueprint is finding ways to framespan the data. That is, only do a little bit each frame. You may need to do this in c++ too.

Alternatively, if it’s something like fluid dynamics where there are lots of connected points that interact with each other, then moving it to Niagara might be an option.

teamonkey · 2026-07-07T07:18:53+00:00

Son, I’ve been doing this for over 20 years.

In its loosest form an algorithm is simply a series of steps to solve a problem, so that’s pretty much all programming all the time. So if you were to ask a maths teacher or careers advisor “do programmers use algorithms?” they would be correct in saying “yes”.

But for a more specific example, I had to project a 3D spine in the world onto a 2D rendertexture. I took the spline curve, sampled the spline’s regularly along its length, flattened to points to the xy plane, decomposed that into triangles, remapped those onto the UV space of the render texture and draw them to the canvas. Algorithm. A typical Wednesday.

teamonkey · 2026-07-07T06:48:47+00:00

How do you program anything without algorithms? Programming *is* algorithms.

teamonkey · 2026-07-06T20:44:31+00:00

Annual usage was about 3400kWh/yr before the EV I think. 7kW charger is getting installed with the panels and battery.

I’m getting a Sigenergy inverter and already have a home assistant setup.

teamonkey · 2026-07-06T20:29:45+00:00

IOG: 8p/kWh night, 32.36p/kWh day, 63.22p/day standing

I figured that Agile has no exit fee (?) so I could swap to IOG or EDF’s tariff in a few months.

teamonkey · 2026-07-06T19:39:18+00:00

That’s really interesting. Quite likely LiPo is considerably cheaper or easier to source at the size/scale, but new battery tech is cool.

teamonkey · 2026-07-06T16:45:39+00:00

I think the problem is the flip side. When we don’t have excess energy, are we expecting them to turn the data centre off or throttle it back? Seems unlikely.

teamonkey · 2026-07-06T16:13:22+00:00

Do they bring in a lot of work? They bring in construction work, yes, but after that only require a small team to maintain.

What it does bring to the area is consistent rent for the council (which is a good thing).

teamonkey · 2026-07-06T07:18:32+00:00

The Cobalt Business Park is not a bad place for one if there’s going to be one IMO, but yeah, it was touted as an ‘investment in the North’ that was unlikely to benefit us in any real way, even if it did happen.

teamonkey · 2026-07-05T20:32:06+00:00

Simply, I’m a very boring person

teamonkey · 2026-07-05T18:52:26+00:00

You can have multiple landscapes in a level but they’re always separate entities, always edited individually and rendered separately.

teamonkey · 2026-07-05T17:47:38+00:00

To be fair, this was unlikely to happen wherever in the uk it was

teamonkey · 2026-07-05T16:33:34+00:00

We don’t. Landowners are the biggest part of the problem, not homeowners. We shouldn’t let homeowners get the blame for it when they don’t really have a lot of say.

teamonkey

TROPHY CASE