Hey guys, its HelloWorldTerabyte again!
This isn’t really a game play UE4 c++ question. But i was wondering is UE4 made from straight up C++. Like did it use like a libraries or something(QT?). I know that the source code is made with visual studio(correct me if I’m wrong :)). So is UE4 build from visual studio WPF, MFC or Form or that other stuff?.
Unreal is built using many 3rd party libraries, however it does not make use or any particular os ui frameworks. Aside from the minimum necessary to get a window and a hardware surface to draw to. On windows that’s straight up win32 and it looks like on *nix, SDL is used.
The UI framework used in the engine is called Slate, it’s a custom framework that is part of UE4
OK thanks. so the gui is made from a custom lib that is devolped by UE team?
Yes, basically they are making draw calls to the graphics card/etc using native OS API.
From the wiki about Slate;
Yeah, pretty much. They’ve got about 25 years of code history to build off of. So, they’re most likely building off of their previous work. And of course, they take full advantage of third party libraries these days, such as DirectX written by Microsoft. That’s the only thing that makes sense. Way back in the day before DirectX was around, people making games and game engines had to write all of their code to work with every hardware device out on the market. If a device driver was shoddy or the hardware got updated, your game might crash. It sucked. When a game programmer wants to draw a triangle to the screen, they should only have to write the implementation code once, not once for each hardware profile. Anyways, now parties like MS release a library which creates a layer of abstraction between the coder and the hardware, and all hardware manufacturers have to make sure that their devices are compliant with DirectX and any other major third party libraries. All the programmer has to worry about is making sure that their code works well with DirectX. It would be a collosal waste of time, energy and resources to forego the use of third party tools for the sake of being purist.
You are wrong. The source code is independent of an IDE. Whether its written in visual studio or something else doesn’t really matter. The compiler will turn source code into a binary, regardless of what tool was used to write it. The epic team built the UE4 editor using their own GUI tools called “Slate”.