controlling the editor externally with python

Development Programming & Scripting C++
1

hey guys,

couldn’t really find a section in the forums for python scripting so I’m going to post here for now…

I’m on the journey of automating some processes between Vectorworks and Unreal engine 4.27. I’m using data smith to send some Vectorworks stuff to unreal from Vectorworks via their internal python scripting plugins.

Questions:
can I open an unreal project externally and tell it to trigger a python script?

  • I don’t want to use the startup scripts because I want to be able to open the UE project without running the import process.

is it possible to use an existing UE project as a template?

  • the idea is every time this script runs, it’ll make a new version of the UE project I select and give it a new name.
2

I know absolutely nothing about how the Python interface works, but I do know that you can provide commands to run to the editor at startup, by passing it
-ExecCmds="stat fps"

so if you can cause the editor to start a python script from an exec command, then you could do that. If you’re into modding the engine, you could add your own command line switches to take different actions, too.