I’ve developed and released a few games in the UDK (iOS and PC) where we never used Scaleform for HUD processing, it was handled all through script (James Tan and Marko Parmento which we adjusted to fix some bugs) which provided nodes for Kismet to output images, text etc as well as handling mouse movement and key presses (E.G. buttons)etc.
In UE4 has the need to learn and (I assume purchase) yet another external application (Scaleform) been replaced in Blueprint or will we need to start from scratch and develop our own software to handle what was available for UDK …?
Well since there is no scaleform support i’d say you’re probably not going to use Scaleform. Instead look for Slate (in documentation, answerhub and here on the forum).
Unfortunately its not so fantastic anymore if you look at the pricing of Coherent UI. At least for people who just wanna play around with the engine.
I am currently working on an OpenSource version which basically will do the same except that it uses Awesomium as renderer, which is available for free for anyone not making more than 100k a year. And you can replace with the more suitable Coherent UI (because of 64-bit support) when you can afford it. Give me a few weeks or so ;).
Doing a search on Slate shows almost nothing on it, is it Epic’s preferred path?
I would have thought that if Blueprint is so powerful we should be able to do most HUD stuff from within it. After all as mentioned above I could build games in UDK where the entire HUD (including button processing) was done in Kismet
First of all I doubt that Slate is what Epic has intended to be used as in-game GUI. It’s clearly a old-school desktop like system which may play out well for things like Unreal Editor. But games usuall have a much more drastic and innovative approach to GUI systems and they are by very definition not compatible with each other.
I think that UE4 is not ready for everyone yet. A proper GUI system will most likely be added later. For now you can either “abuse” Slate, use Coherent UI, Scaleform, etc… Or simply write your GUI using sprites & what not.
As for Blueprints. Your can do anything with it, but you may have to write proper C++ components. For instance if you had components where you could assign sprites for different states of a button and get OnClick events, etc. from it then you could consume such a component in BP and build a GUI with it. So its not so much a limitation of BP as rather that the components you need are not there yet (even though I am unaware if they are there or not).
We have also been looking into Scaleform and contacted Autodesk for that matter. They do support UE4 for windows only. We are all on Macs. Also you couldn’t package to iOS or Android they said.
Also Coherent UI doesn’t support mobile nor UE4 on Mac.
Is this in the roadmap somewhere? Can you link? I’d love to keep on top of this because I’m in pre-production right now and so far I’m not liking what I’m seeing with UE4’s UI support.
Might be too late for this project. Are there any demos or references anywhere to see what can it do? Scaleform allowed us to develop full on animated HUDs, menus and in some case full on screens. I really hope UMG will allow us to animate the UI like in Flash. Having the word Motion in it is promising
we made a short demo reel of our integration in UE4. We took the Shooter Game provided by Unreal Engine and put an alternative HUD that replaces the one made with Slate.
The UI elements that you’ll see in the HUD are: animated HP bar, animated ammo count, kill counter, current weapon indicator and a detailed kill log.
The Demo also glances at the possibilities of using UI elements in the 3D game world. First, we open an inventory, where we change our primary weapon, after which we hit a UI button to “take the elevator” and go to a secret location in the level. Of course the latest can be used for different kind of player interaction (e.g door handlers, monitor screens, etc.)
The two way UI binding (game -> HTML and HTML -> game) is done all in blueprints without a single line of C++. The only thing that is done in C++ is broadcasting events for when health or ammo is changed.
Hope you guys will like the vide, we’ll be making a series of tutorials on how we did it
How is it coming along?