I’ve recently been working with editor utility widgets and I was wondering if they are limited only to the UMG widget system. What i’d like to do is have an editor widget that uses the interface of the animation state machine system, but for managing data in a visualized graph and I’d like it to be customizable. I understand something like this has been done with the not yet dialogue system on the UE4 marketplace, but I was wondering how that developer went about making something like that. I have a lot of c++ experience but not much in terms of modifying the engine code, so i wanted to make sure this isn’t possible with built in tools already before i dive in with c++. Thanks!
Utility Widgets was primerly made for blueprint only users in mind which don’t have experience in C++ to extend editor and primerly to automatize the editor rether then adding features to it. UMG was also blueprint wrapper of Slate which is used normally editor UI and if oyu extend editor in C++ you need to use Slate instead of UMG. You dont need to modify engine code to extend editor, there many ways to avoid that and extend editor from external modules (C++ project or plugin), you need to remember that if you run your code in editor then you technically becomes part of editor and you can do normal calls to editor code. main way is by using extenders which you can hear about here:
Many other features just require adding classes or just registering them to editor with function calls, like creating own asset types. You can read about it here for example:Biggest problem is fact that extending editor is a wild land journey as there not much documentation (due to fact making games is most likely top priority for UE4 documentation team), you either need to lurk in engine code places to hook up or google tutorial from others that walked that way and share there expirance.
Regardless what you gonna do you need to learn Slate, you can read about slate here:
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