After working with Unity, I became very used to using empty actors as parent objects to group other actors together. They usually didn’t remain “empty” for long, however. Most of the time they’d end up getting loaded up with functionality and using the hierarchical structure makes it incredibly simple to work with. For example, if I have a bunch of power-ups in the scene, I can group them all under a parent object called Powerup Manager or something. Then I can store all the spawn locations on this parent object and make it responsible for randomly spawning powerups, delivering powerup rewards to the player, and keeping track of all power-up related data. To operate on all the powerups, the Powerup Manager only has to access its children instead of searching through the entire scene or filtering by some layer or tag.
How about creating an empty actor with a tag as the parent? I think that would be useful because then you can easily find the parent and do exactly as you say, sounds like a good idea, besides folder to keep things clean of course.
I guess Empty Actors are more cumbersome than using Folder, so I would stick with Folder to keep my hierarchy neat. When arise the need to have a functionnality as a parent, then I’ll consider putting an Empty Actor. I used them in unity as well and found that it’s very powerful tool to use.
About the layers, The way @ben talks about them, it’s just about visibility in the scene. So it’s not the same as layers in Utnity?
Something I was wondering… if we can make target points children of empty actors, couldn’t we make target points children to previous target point instead?
Like you, I also have some Experience in Unity. I use the the “empty” gameobject for both organizaional purposes (and yes tidiness (for Ben) and for moving a group of gameobjects as one (mainly for positioning purposes during game development). Here I’m using the folder system because it mainly for tidiness and organizational purposes.