Is the Unreal Editor itself scriptable?

Development Getting Started & Setup
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1

Hello nice people, thanks for reading.

My question: Is it possible to script the editor to build sort of a customizable pool of commands somewhere, e.g. in the menu or so?

For example: Say I want to switch on/off the visibility of several types of objects in the viewport at once, how can I do this?

Another example: I want to alter several console variable settings at once, with one command. Is this possible?

And, sort of same topic: Are such “visibilty-flags” reflected in the console variables?

Thanks a lot!

2

Short version: yes. There is source-code you can compile from scratch, otherwise, I suggest you look into Editor Widgets.

The editor is a running ‘game’ of Unreal (the core renderer), with a UI bolted on top which then gives you access to root objects like actors, characters, etc.

I cannot see why you might be able to make a blueprint with GetAllActorsOfClass, GetActorsWithTag, etc, etc; and then do whatnot when you have your list.

1 Like
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Agreed. For what you’re asking, utility widgets are the answer. Once you create and set them up, right click on the bp in the content manager and run utility.

4

Ok, thank you so much.

Sounds complicated for a beginner, however I can create a widget, run that, execute the blueprint, ok. But it is so hard for me to find out what exactly to search for setting it up. Take my example to show/hide the foliage. I draw a button in the widget, then switch to OnClicked-Event in the graph. But what next?

Is there a way to see what the editor does unter the hood when switching on/off via the menu? In a log file or so? Output log does not spit out anything.

Thanks!

5

you create an editor utility widget then add a bunch of buttons for what you need to do, then you need to use the subsystems which will give you access to various areas of the editor.

Off course knowledge of the engine, editor and blueprints is required. What you want to do?

There are nodes that can run console commands.

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In other words, you don’t know what you don’t know. Yup, we all start there. Only reason I knew of those two functions is I happened to see them up in the context menu when working on BPs.

Unreal does make it somewhat easier to ‘explore’ the API structure, but in the beginning it does take some effort to look for things, start catching the keywords. For example, now that you know ‘actor’, you can type that into the context-menu and see you can get the actor’s world location, it’s vectors, other information. KNOWING is just exploring and that comes down to time.

My best suggestion is to look for tutorials on/around the things you want to do and just start absorbing knowledge. There IS a reason to the rhyme.