Hi there,
Let me preface this by expressing my gratitude for all the hard work done by Epic. I come from a strong background in UI design and my knowledge of game engine programming is woeful so forgive my ignorance if the following seems a bit off.
I understand we’re early into the life cycle here but I feel UI tools aren’t really up to par with the rest of the systems.
UE4 has incredible visual fidelity but I haven’t seen many pretty UI examples.
My concern is that it seems the only way to achieve an attractive and functional modern UI design is to use middleware or plugins (scaleform or a html/css/js renderer).
(I’m not suggesting a scaleform integration as I understand there might be some licensing issues on that end.)
My hope therefore is that UI/UMG gets some serious love in terms of an expanded feature set.
There are third party systems to render html/css/js (coherent ui) showing promise.
I’d love if there were a system built into UE4 that used this general idea of rendering html5/css3/js code in engine for UI. For users who don’t know these languages a simple styling-panel could expose properties to edit and small webview could render back the styling (on refresh) to get immediate feedback of changes. (I’d love a preprocessor integration to allow more robust design) Perhaps though you’ve already considered this and it has too much processing overhead or is too niche of a usage.
I know we aren’t always privy to details on every discussion that goes on so if my feedback is off base don’t hesitate to let me know.