[MAJOR] Almost all hidden properties are now disallowed, they have been allowed since UEFN released until 34.30.

Velocity_Zero · August 11, 2025, 12:45pm

This is understandable, but on the flip side, imo we should have a migration path in the future for a full nanite only path, but in the meantime permit opting out of nanite. The reality is that we have a very constrained cook size budget already and a nanite only reality is potentially at least 5 years away from now as we will need to phase out many lowend devices Fortnite supports and wait until all GPUs can support nanite. Do we want the creators to wait potentially that long?

Similar story applies to opting out from Lumen, for visual and possibly performance reasons. I‘m not experienced enough to tell if there is an alternative way of disabling it in UE projects unlike with the post processing volume which is scheduled for 37.10. In case there is a better way of disabling Lumen and global illumination, I’d advocate to expose this setting as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to go out full nanite, but the budgets and constants can be very hard to deal with.

Kev.EG · August 11, 2025, 3:58pm

Let me look into this and loop back tomorrow.

Kev.EG · August 11, 2025, 3:59pm

Yes, you should be able to set the Bounds Scale right on the mesh component right now to make sure you have sane bounds in case you are manuipulating the underlying mesh with for example WPO.

AtAshTag · August 11, 2025, 4:01pm

Thank you kind sir this was an issue for so long

Kev.EG · August 12, 2025, 9:18am

Ok I’ve exposed the bounds on the mesh asset for 38.00.

Velocity_Zero · August 12, 2025, 11:41am

@Kev.EG anything new about these two requests?

Sprintermax · August 12, 2025, 12:58pm

bConstrainAspectRatio should not only be exposed but also having the default value for it being “false”, currently is default to true and lots of creators (specially innexperient ones) does not fix it for supporting other aspect ratios, causing lots of bugs and even affecting things that should not such as core fortnite UI itself

Kev.EG · August 13, 2025, 7:56am

I’m not super familiar with the camera actor dependencies, but I don’t really see a good reason for that not being exposed, in addition to the Aspect Ratio and FOV. I can dig a little and see if there’s a good reason or if we simply haven’t gotten to it yet.

I can also mention that it’s only the CameraActor that has it enabled by default explicitly, the CameraComponent actually has it disabled by default. The change is 10+ years old so I don’t have the context, but can try to find out.

I’d be curious to hear how you’re using the camera component in your work and what bugs you’re seeing with the constraint aspect ratio enabled.

Kev.EG · August 13, 2025, 8:05am

As for Nanite Landscape - I believe the plan is to dedicate resources towards the new terrain system instead of making the current system optimal in UEFN. There will be more info on that system at Unreal Fest in September. I guess that also answers @AllyJax question on RVT - it’s likely that RVT will be introduced through the new terrain system once that makes it to UEFN.

AllyJax · August 13, 2025, 8:08am

Is there anywhere I can go to get some info regarding this new terrain system? What’s different to what we’ve had basically forever now?

Kev.EG · August 13, 2025, 8:21am

It used to be on the public roadmap, but I don’t see it there anymore - it’s probably being reworked for 5.7. There are a couple of talks at Unreal Fest you can see on the agenda schedule. I don’t think there are any technical details out on it yet, but that will come as documentation starts rolling out for 5.7.

Velocity_Zero · August 13, 2025, 11:10am

Mostly this is a user experience problem. The constrained aspect ratio generates either horizontal or vertical black bars on the players end depending of their screen aspect ratio which is simply not ideal. I would like to animate the camera like a drone flying over my world, or some kind of a game transition. Such experience should not have any black bars at all, but be presented in unconstrained full screen manner.

I’d love FOV settings to be exposed as well. As for FOV, I work on vehicle focused experiences and FOV is commonly used in order to tweak the sense of speed.

Velocity_Zero · August 13, 2025, 11:16am

The “Forward Looking” tab has been removed for some reason. I asked Jean-Sebastien about it, but he couldn’t provide an answer for the exact reasoning.

It was briefly mentioned during the last UE Fest in Orlando, but nothing specific has been shown except that the goal was to show it with 5.7, which now seems to be the case.

Mesh Terrain has been announced to be presented at Unreal Fest 2025 in Stockholm.

I’m very keen to see where this is heading. And I hope UEFN gets the support as fast as possible. I really wonder what the cook size will be.

RVT and render targets are very important to me in the long term as well, but I think the main problem is that UEFN has no HLSL support due to some security issues. Hopefully there will be some kind of Verse like wrapper in order to enable custom shader nodes. This is also very important for the PCG plugin as many things are moving towards the GPU which may also require HLSL.

Velocity_Zero · August 13, 2025, 12:35pm

@Kev.EG more requests.

Why are collision related features hidden? In the past we had some of these exposed in the landscape spline meshes (iirc), but thoese are hidden now. Basically whenever we set the ‘Collision Preset’ we have no idea what collision responses it will have. And there are a ton of different presets. While we cannot create custom presets yet, it’s still handy to know how the collision responses will be set depending on the existing presets. This reduces the trial and error through pure guessing.

Can we please get custom complex collision mesh exposed in the mesh asset setting?

I was told by some of your colleagues to abuse an extra LOD level as a workaround. It should be explicitly configured so small so the engine will never switch to it, but the LOD mesh would be used a custom collision geometry. I think just using custom collision mesh would be much nicer and more convenient.

Please expose Spline component and Spline Mesh components / Actor. All 3 validate just fine, but cannot be added or placed if needed. One can place a spline using the modeling drawing tools, but the regular actor variant is still missing.

Can we get culling settings on (H)ISM components please? Controlling culling is very important when it comes to optimizations.

How about the LOD related settings on the mesh component?

Can we get Is Editor Only setting on the mesh component? It’s often very convenient to place some helper meshes for visualization purposes that should be excluded from the final cooked build.

The spline mesh component is missing all those settings. It requires to be configured in UE in order to be placed in UEFN, which is very very tedious. This also makes it impossible to tweak those directly within UEFN.

Equally, the spline component is missing a lot of settings as well. Not all are needed in UEFN (e.g. construction script related toggle).

When it comes to mesh components, I personally rely on many of these settings as I need to migrate them from UE to UEFN as I’m using PCG to generate them. However I’m unable to edit many of those settings directly in UEFN afterwards. On top of that, I assume that if the validation process will be very strict about those, it will stop from validating for very simple things like spline (mesh) positions, which will be very very sad.

In my case I’m building a hybrid project. Static world using SM, (H)ISM, FISM, (soon-ish) PCG ISM, SplineMesh and for dynamic objects where I need to query collision for example I rely on Scene Graph entity based meshes. However I cannot just go with SG only right now or anytime soon. I need the most bits from actor based mesh components.

EDIT:

Dear @Kev.EG after hours and hours trying different UMG layout widgets and settings I figured out that there are two hidden properties on the Size Box. Can you please expose these two asap?

Min Aspect Ratio
Max Aspect Ratio

I was trying to replicate the same behavior of the RR car UI, but it’s simply wasn’t possible without these two settings because the in-game HUD Scale will otherwise scale the width and my own overlay widget would appear in the wrong place and not mimic the native UI behavior. These settings solved it for me.