[Open Beta] Procedural On-the-Fly Animation in UE4: iTween!

Hi everyone, thank you for your patience!

Here is iTween for 5.2! iTween_5_2_0_0.zip - Google Drive

Note that this is the last time I will be publishing iTween to the forums. From now on, iTween will be available from the Unreal Engine marketplace like any other plugin and will continue to be free of charge.

Included in this release is the old iTween plugin and the new one. Please take this opportunity to update your projects to use the new iTween plugin. I will publish a manual soon to outline how to use the new version of the plugin as well as some migration tips to help you get up to speed with the new plugin.

To install, remove the iTween folder from your current project’s plugins folder, then unzip “iTween” and “iTweenOld” to your plugins folder.

The new plugin is much faster but is a complete rewrite, so we couldn’t just automatically convert much of anything - you will need to manually update all of your nodes to use the new plugin. I apologize for this hassle, but this is the cost of progress. Nothing will stop you from using the old plugin, but after 5.2 you will need to compile it yourself.

The new plugin is the same one that will be published to the marketplace when it’s approved by Epic. The marketplace will not include the old plugin, only the new plugin. The new plugin will initially be available on the marketplace for 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2. The release linked in this post only includes 5.2. The old and new plugins can be installed side by side while you convert from the old to the new.

The reason for the rewrite is to have more speed at runtime and flexibility at design time, including for C++ users. The old plugin code was far too bloated at this point so retrofitting new features into it was close to impossible. The new code does everything the old code did in a more modular way, which should be better for designers to also take a modular approach to tweening operations.

The reason for the move to the marketplace is because I can’t keep compiling the plugin for all of its supported platforms on my own. In order to keep fixes and features coming, I need to leverage the marketplace’s continuous integration. Again, the plugin will remain free and there are no plans to monetize iTween for Unreal Engine. Ever.

New features for the new plugin include:

  • Now actual UE delegates are used for OnStart, OnUpdate and OnComplete events which are much faster.
  • Runtime overhead improvements of up to 20%!
  • UMG orientation pointing widgets toward direction of travel, another widget, or a 3D object in your scene!
  • Struct-based functions - create any tween using a single function by passing in struct data. C++ users no longer need to fill out gargantuan function signatures and BP users can get all of the controls that the “Full” node provided in the old plugin with a tenth of the node height!

A sample project using the new plugin for 5.2 is available here: iTweenShowcase.zip - Google Drive

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