Continuity gives Unreal a musical clock. Point it at whatever already drives your show — Ableton Live, a Move or Push, any Link-enabled app or device, a MIDI clock, timecode — and Sequencer, Niagara, materials, Blueprints and Movie Render Queue all land on the beat.
It is also a toolkit for rhythm games, with three templates: a piano tutorial, a beat game and a note highway, plus a 2D screen view for drum pads and a piano roll. The demos play one song on all of them, on the internal clock with a backing track: the piano highway on A–K or a MIDI keyboard, the drum pads on Z X C V and A S D F or your own pads. The manual gives the recipe for each.
Ships in your Windows game. The transport, MIDI input, note highways, hit judge, score HUD and Niagara data interface all package into a Windows game, and a highway plays its chart against its backing track on the internal clock with no external gear. Ableton Link stays in the editor: its licence forbids shipping it inside a title, so following Live over Link works in the editor and with -game, and a packaged game follows MIDI Clock, MTC or LTC, or its own clock. Movie Render Queue renders also happen in the editor. In the editor, the musical clock lives in the Play session: open a level and press Play, and the transport panel reads OFFLINE until you do.
What it follows
Ableton Link — any Link-enabled app or device on Wi-Fi or LAN, no cable: Live, Ableton Move, a standalone Push 3 and the rest. Bar 1 lands on the bar the music starts on, and Free Run follows peers that never share play and stop.
MIDI Clock + Song Position — bar numbers follow the arrangement.
MIDI Timecode and SMPTE LTC — chase a video or DAW timeline at 24, 25, 29.97 drop-frame or 30 fps.
RTP-MIDI / AppleMIDI — the clock lives on another machine; no interface needed.
Internal — author and rehearse with no gear at all.
Offline render — Movie Render Queue frames follow sequence time and the tempo map, so a frame that takes four seconds to render is still one frame of music.
Note highways and rhythm games
A note highway draws lanes, a hit line and notes that land exactly on their beat — on a piano keyboard, one lane per drum, or lanes that split a pitch range — and trails the notes you play live out behind the line.
A hit judge makes it a game: MIDI keyboards and pads (it has to be the right note), the computer keyboard, or a gamepad or any other input through Blueprint. Perfect / Good / Miss windows, score, combo, accuracy and calibration.
Charts come from a .mid exported from Live, or from playing a part in, and export as plain JSON that a shipped game reads with its own code.
Drum and sample pads in 2D: blocks scroll into a play line beside a pad map laid out like your controller's pads, each pad lights before its note and plays its own sound on the hit. Press P and hit each pad once, and the plugin learns your controller. Piano parts get a piano roll in the same view.
Animate to the beat
The Niagara driver sends tempo, beat, bar, knobs, notes and named cues into any Niagara system and into Motion Design Cloners and Effectors, with no Blueprint wiring. A clip launched in Live fires a chain of systems on the beat while the notes you play colour an Effector.
Beat animation locks a looping animation to the beat: it reads a walk's footsteps from the clip's own foot markers and pins one to every beat, or every half beat, through tempo changes and renders. Or let the tempo set an Animation Blueprint's speed.
Cue sheets repeat a cue every few beats or bars, Ableton arrangement locators become named cues, and Mark Bars puts your bars on the Sequencer timeline to key against.
Also inside
More than 100 Blueprint nodes: musical time, Wait For Beat, a step-pattern component, quantised triggers, MIDI and controller state, OSC out on the beat grid.
A Niagara data interface (CPU and GPU), and musical time written into a Material Parameter Collection every frame, so any material pulses on the beat with no Blueprint.
MPE: pitch bend, pressure and slide for every sounding note.
Key-aware note colours: notes that belong together musically get colours that belong together.
Named cues from live MIDI or a baked cue sheet, identical live and in renders.
A transport panel: position, tempo, timecode, Link peers and clock lock at a glance.
Source included, and a full manual inside the plugin and at continuity-link.com/docs.