Use APL (Android Programming Language) to make Android plugin to Unreal Engine 4

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1

I’m trying to develop Unreal Engine 4 plugin for Android camera API 2.

As I could read on Unreal Engine forums, there two possibilities to make a plugin for Android.

  • The first, consist on modifying the UE Android base project (GameActivity).
  • The second is a standalone plugin, which brings portability to add the plugins in any project.

According to this post, it is possible to make a camera Api1 standalone plugin, which uses APL.xml file to add java code.

But I think it is very limited to a Game activity.

So my questions are:

¿Is this the only way to make a standalone plugin for Unreal Engine 4?

¿Is there a XML tag to add custom Java classes in this APL files?

Thank you.

2

UPL (Unreal Plugin Language) is the new name now it has been generalized for iOS plist modification as well.

You can use it to make additions to GameActivity.java during packaging from a plugin. Adding a new class to GameActivity can be done with gameActivityClassAdditions section.

Or, you can have the UPL file copy your own java files to be compiled either in the src build path, or as an AAR to extract by adding it dynamically to the aar-imports.txt, or by directly copying the library into JavaLibs in the prebuildCopies section.

You can find documentation for UPL in the comment block at the top of the UnrealPluginLanguage.cs source file on GitHub.

3

You can check my plugins on GitHub: gameDNAstudio (gameDNA) / Repositories · GitHub I think they’re a good example of using UPL :slight_smile: