Landscape mode extremely sluggish when scatters are active
I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a "feature", so I tagged this with both "bug" and "feature request".
When there are active scatters in a native UE landscape, any action in Landscape mode is extremely slow. The whole UI becomes sluggish, even clicking in buttons that have nothing to do with the scatters themselves. For example, in one extreme case I measured, I had to wait 70 seconds just to be able to change from Landscape mode to Selection mode. If I freeze the scatters, this behavior disappears and everything becomes normal.
One problem is that there's no way (as far as I could find) to freeze all scatters at once. If I have 10 scatters in a terrain, I have to select one by one and freeze/unfreeze one by one. This is extremely annoying. There should be a way to freeze/unfreeze all at once.
Another problem is that there's no visual way to tell whether a given scatter is frozen or not, so I'm never really sure if I already froze/unfroze it. It would be nice if the currently selected option becomes visually obvious somehow. One good option would be a simple toggle button "Frozen", ticked or not, instead of the two options "Freeze/Unfreeze".
Ideally, of course, there should be no sluggishness at all... But assuming this isn't possible, the next best would be to have a general setting in Preferences to automatically freeze/unfreeze when we switch to, or leave from, Landscape mode.
3 Replies
Appreciate the feedback! Implemented a freeze/unfreeze workflow to make this easy: You select an object that affects any tools in your scene, like say a landscape, then you run the freeze/unfreeze action, and it'll change the state of all tools that use the terrain.
Next step would be to show an icon on the Dash toolbar when you select the scattered objects, kind of like how selecting your scattered objects will show an icon to edit it. That way, you'll know what is frozen and what isn't by just selecting it.
That's brilliant, thanks. 🙂 The one point left now is to remember to always freeze before entering Landscape mode. I see a potential failure mode, either because the user simply didn't remember to do it or doesn't even know that this exists. I think the proposal in my last sentence before would be useful.