I am looking to have an application (written in any language at this point) that can have an embedded viewport into what the unreal game engine is rendering and allowing two-way communication between the host application and unreal engine (Inter Process Communication). This larger idea talks about many applications for this, but UnrealCV has shown the most progress towards the computer vision research but still fails to render into a viewport.
I’ve spent two hours researching if this is possible and get a bunch of varied answers or methodologies but none of them seem to end up working (according to them) or I can’t find an end project that was successful. In the various threads on this topic, it’s mentioned how Unity can already do this, and that disheartening as someone researching which technology stack works best for my use case and favors Unreal.
Ideally, I am looking for an existing solution but I am open to methodologies or even off-the-wall ideas so that I can at least explore them. My use case is pretty simple: Allow an embedded window that works exactly like the native unreal application but allow simple commands between each other, for example: “connect to server at this ip” sent from host application, and “user has disconnected” from unreal.
I’ve seen a lot of ideas of just using local TCP/IP to communicate between the two processes and I think that is probably the easiest way to do the IPC (much like unrealCV). However, getting a viewport of an interactive render hasn’t had very many fruitful ideas. I’ve seen a lot of suggestions on making a viewport with Slate UI but then end up finding that they ran into issues with no post of resolution. I am hoping these 2014 problems are less of an issue now.
The only idea that has seemed feasible but hacky seems to be PixelStreaming to stream locally to a browser or whatever viewport you wanted, which I believe would probably work but would make me feel dirty if I settled on that work-around.
Any ideas?
References:
Embed/Integrate output from UE4 into a C++ application - C++ - Epic Developer Community Forums
Embed Unreal in a host application
How to embed UE4 into an iOS app? - Mobile - Epic Developer Community Forums
Embedding UE4 into VS C++ application - Pipeline & Plugins - Epic Developer Community Forums
Could I get some help with getting a standalone app running? - C++ - Epic Developer Community Forums