<aside> 🗒️ Part of Ari's Unreal Engine Notes.

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C++ land shouldn't be hard referencing assets/blueprints at all. Specially not in constructors.

Assets should only be loaded by UE via UPROPERTY() references that should be set by the user in a blueprint extending the C++ classes you want to use them in. And for soft loading assets, the soft object path should still be set via UPROPERTY() and not in code. When we do that then assets lifetime and reference practices are followed correctly.

If you circumvent UE's asset loading system then you are:

• Adding a big delay before the first frame of the game can be shown since it needs to load all of these before the engine even finishes initializing.
• Adding all the objects to a permanent object pool that disregards GC and never gets garbage collected.
• Making the game crash when those objects try to reference anything outside of that disregard pool like when they try to load their own assets later on.