Myth wrote:I'm talking about actors that only affect the visual side of the game. For example an actor which displays a mesh, but has no collision whit player actors and doesn't modify the gameplay in any way except for the one case in which it reduces your visibility. Something like a floating brute in a skybox, or birds flying around, or that dripping water from the always leaky pipe.
Well, in a short list you can do the next depending on the situation:
- Something that you place while mapping, and it runs absolutelly no code at all: you set bStatic=True and it won't be replicated at all.
- Something that you place while mapping, but it runs some code: everything you have to remember is this: replication of variables and such only occurs when these change somehow, generally server side, and functions are only called client side if they are relevant to the clients (like almost all simulated functions). So, let's say your decoration actor is running some sort of code and it's always changing variables, and since it doesn't affect gameplay anyhow (only visual effect), you can set it's remoterole to none, as:
ROLE_None: Never replicates a thing, the actor runs independently from the server.
ROLE_DumbProxy: It's updated on the clients constantly by the server, but in a effective way, only on the change of variables.
ROLE_SimulatedProxy: For something that can be simulated independently from the server (like Physics), but still, it's not like ROLE_None, as it still gets replicated info from the server (like when it hits a wall, or another condition if fullfilled).
Myth wrote:By putting ROLE_SimulatedProxy as default and after changing it to ROLE_None, wouldn't their Spawn event still be replicated?
Yes and no. When a spawn call is executed in a simulated function that is called by another simulated function, what happens is that the spawn is called both on clients and server. And in general, the server replicates every single new actor created there to the clients during gameplay, if their remoterole is equal or above DumbProxy. So, the client would have 2 copies of the same actor (where 1 would be simply a kinda of "illusion"), so to avoid the server to send info of the new actor, we set its remote role to none, and the server won't replicate which would be the 2nd copy on the client of the same actor.
Now you may ask, so why we don't set ROLE_None by default and avoid that. The truth is, the simulated function thing is not 100% accurate, so in some functions that works (like simulated PostBeginPlay() for example), but with many functions being called from eachothers (simulated and non-simulated), if the actor has ROLE_none by default, it might never being spawned on the client, since it won't be relevant to the client and it won't be replicated from the server. Sometimes, even this won't work somehow, so I must say that replication can be a real b*tch as well.
Myth wrote:
Can't I just mark an actor to be never replicated and always simulated on clients and non dedicated servers?
An actor like that would have then ROLE_None in RemoteRole.
(I tried to make the weapons playable online, and they work almost fine, only some effects doesn't appear, and some stuff that have to be attached to players (visible of course) are kind laggy, due to DumbProxy, but GuidedRedeemer isn't, and it's DumbProxy too (maybe are some SavedMoves stuff that I don't understand yet)
