General UI Questions

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi all,

I’ll be signing up to download the engine this weekend, but I thought I would just a ask a couple of general questions regarding the unreal4 engine.

  1. I’ve read that Slate is the new framework for creating a UI. I went through the documentation but I couldn’t see anything specific to drag-and-drop functions. I’m wondering if DnD functionality has, or will be, implemented? I’m specifically interested in dragging icons between windows, and nodes within a Treegraph.

  2. As an alternative to Slate is it possible to create a UI using somthing like JQuery if I was to just target HTML5 as a deployment?

  3. The reason I ask the above leads on to my next question which is whether the unreal4 engine can be used to create 3D applications, rather than just games? I’ve been working on a 3D tool for a few years now but I’ve had bad luck with other 3d engines. The last two engines I was using were abandoned by the developers, which kind of left me in limbo.

Thanks
6

2
  1. Not a Slate expert, so I’ll let someone else answer.
  2. One user has already created a V8 plugin so you can script things with JavaScript. Coherent is going to announce Unreal Engine 4 support soon. It allows you to create HTML5+JS+CSS3 overlays with full feature set of Chrome.
  3. Since you can create 2D or 3D games, I don’t see why you couldn’t make a non-game 3D application. You may see a slightly higher performance hit than if you used a framework designed for 3D app.
3

Thanks Acenth. I’ve never heard of Coherent before but what they’ve done is very interesting. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the UE4 implementation, although I wonder if this will still have the $650 price tag.