I realize that one of the things that I miss being able to do in making games, is what I did in visual effects. I’ve written hundreds of tools over my career that optimize how I work (and my teams). I’m not sure how to do that out of gameplay in UE4.
So for instance, I have an educational game I’m working on to give an idea of where I’m going. In the game I spell out words with missing letters that the player has to finish, hunting for missing letters. Think of big scrabble letters (but not scrabble) that you have to find and put in place.
I have to go through and script together the words, and the missing letters, and the colliders and then place the pickup letters, and all this isn’t hard, but it is tedious and time consuming and often takes longer to set up and test than it takes me to build an actual game level.
So I want to write a tool that I can use to generate a word that I feed it. It would take the word and could use a target or one for each letter, and plug in the letters and the missing letters and then plug all of that into my blueprint of how that all gets affected in gameplay.
The problem is I realize i can probably use Spawning to do this in game, but that’s not really what I’m looking for. I want to do this in game setup, and plug in a word and generate it, and have it appear in my editor so i can fuss with it, and it also fits more into my save game system which needs to know the exact letter (class) that it is saving out through out the game.
---- Here is the question -----
My question is, can I write my own UE4 Tools through blueprint functions and have them execute in the editor OUTSIDE of gameplay?
I know someone is bound to poo-poo this idea, but I’ve done this hundreds if not thousands of time in production and can tell you that it is incredibly valuable and would cut off hundreds of hours of game creation which is valuable to all teams, and specifically to indie developers like myself.
You can use blutilities for this although they aren’t brilliant depending on your requirements. I would also be using a data table and custom struct to be storing the words and generating from that.
Your other option is to create a plugin so that you can add in functionality yourself.
UE4 is completely open source so you can do whatever you feel like with it so nothing is restricting you from being able to do whatever you want with it.
Thanks Zoltan, I know you’re right. I think sometimes it’s just the matter of having the right keywords to search for. I’ve been searching for plugins now and custom blueprints. Plugins get better, but I’m hoping to keep this in blueprints if I can. I’m looking more closely at Plugins this morning, but if anyone has any more thoughts on this let me know.
I did a lot of research yesterday, and even spent time doing tutorials in C++ from 3dBuzz, and that’s a good series that I highly recommend. But it quickly became somewhat overwhelming when really all I want to do is what i’ve already written in blueprints, C++ is a detour I’m not willing to take right now. It’s not that I don’t want to write my own plugins in C++ eventually, but not while i’m in the middle of trying to work my way through a game, that’s too much pressure for a single indie developer who also raises two boys (who are homeschooled).
So I did check out the Blutility. Odd that it has a cheeky name that alludes to futility, as if someone at Epic thought it not worth the trouble. I know that is probably not necessarily true, but gems come from the unconscious.
For the record, it IS WORTH THE TROUBLE.
if this works it could really be what i’m looking for. I’m skeptical only because there is almost zero information out there about Blutility. It isn’t even loaded as a default, you have to go and turn it on if you know to even look for it. There is nothing in documentation that I see, very little discussion on the forum about it, I can’t see any really useful stuff is being shared so I’m not even sure how far I can take it.
I know this is probably someone’s pet project, but this is the pet project that i can get behind, put up a paypal button and let me click on it.
-finn
p.s. now how can i rename this thread : We Need More Blutility!
Good to hear that blutility (which is blueprint utility btw) is helpful.
The documentation is not great for it. But you will find that any blueprint function that you create if you click on it, in your option for it you will actually have a tickbox for “run in editor” or something along those lines. Once you tick that you will get a blutility option on your blueprint actor in the game and a dropdown to select and run that blutility. Obviously this version only works for actors in game but I do most of my functions by doing it like this rather than a standalone blutility.
Yes, I’m starting to get more into Blutility. I know it is short for blueprint utility, I don’t mean to offend anyone by implying that the name is not quite advertising what this does.
I think though the main problem is people don’t really know it exists yet, and it is turned off as a default because it’s experimental. I’ve been scratching my head for months trying to figure out how to start bundling things I do into tools without taking a sabbatical to learn C++, not knowing this was here.
Regardless, I’ve joined the blutility conversation here to try to share what I’m doing and learn from others in the hope of building up some momentum with it.