Personally, I think if it’s something that’s going to be turning on and off quite regularly then i’d just use a parameter for the spawn rate and scale that up and down instead of spawning and destroying it
I’d be careful with this. Cascade is horribly inefficient on the CPU, so running a particle system active without spawning any particles is bad for perf. Maybe not a dealbreaker if you’re having fun at home, but it would add up quickly in a production environment.
If it’s for player effects that will be turned on and off quickly and multiple times…it’s usually better to have things loaded.
If you have a reference to any asset in a blueprint, it gets loaded alongside the blueprint. Only soft references need to do an async load, which is good for memory but can cause hitches.
This is what I’m trying to do, but I’m currently having issues just spawning the systems at begin play. Because this is one of those FX that comes on and off quite often.
It sounds like you just want the particle system to be a component of your blueprint, and you should use activate / deactivate functions as you want particles to turn on and off. There is a construction cost to spawning any actor in unreal, so consider that as well. Same with calling destroy.
are Timelines an ok thing to use in general?
Timelines carry a heavy tick cost, if you’re implying to use a timeline simply as a delay, I’d avoid that.
Sorry if any of this is coming in abruptly. If anything I said needs clarification, just ask! I have too many years of knowledge accumulated on this stuff. 