Blutility Editor Functions vs UEditorEngine

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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1

Hello,

I was wondering if there are plans to improve/increase the Editor functions available through Blutilities.

With the existing functions (Editor | Unreal Engine Documentation) I am limited to casting selected actors and running functions on the actors themselves.

I’m hoping to be able to write some editor tools and get some of these functions available:(UEditorEngine | Unreal Engine Documentation)

  • Spawn/Add an actor to a level (AddActor) - for InstancedStaticMesh bulk batching/optimization, I need to drag my container actor in every time. Beyond this one example, there are a ton of tools that would benefit from this
  • Move actor to a level (MoveSelectedActorsToLevel) When dealing with a ton of assets, it would be nice to be able to move them into correct streaming levels through a Blutility
  • Rename instance (SetActorLabelUnique) the available “Rename Asset” renames the actual .uasset file instead of the instance
  • Replace Actor (ReplaceActors) if I want to do this, I need to drag all replacements into the level, bulk select everything, move the replacements into place and delete the original after doing a cast comparison.

With a few more Editor specific functions, I would be able to write tools to help facilitate level cleanliness, streaming map contents, world outliner readability, automated optimization support tools, etc.

Thanks in advance,

-James

2

Hi James,

Thank you for the report. We’ll respond as soon as possible.

TJ

3

Hi James,

This is a topic that I care a lot about but I’m afraid there are no short-term plans to expose more existing functionality to Blutilities. It’s certainly desired and going forward we are trying to build new editor APIs as reflected/Blueprint-aware as they are made.

You should be able to expose most things pretty easily using a UBlueprintFunctionLibrary subclass wrapper, and feel free to submit what you come up with and we’ll try to merge it in and maintain it going forward.

Cheers,
Michael Noland