Hi I’ve been using UMG editor for several days now and while it’s great as opposed to plain Slate coding, it still has a lot of issues, or things to be desired. Here i will wite down a couple of things that annoy me or I would like to have.
- The new styles in 4.5 Preview got to be the most annoying thing because I lost the ability to create a common style and apply it to multiple buttons for example. yes we can copy paste styles, but imagine having a few dozen close buttons, copy pasting all the styles, and later on you want to change something, and want to make that change in all buttons. That would be a nightmare. For now i’m just creating a custom blueprint widget containing a button, but that doesn’t feel right, first of all losing the ability to refer directly to the widget, you’d have to refer to a variable or create forwarding functions. The best thing would be something of both worlds, supporting derived styles. (Right now, not even settings made in the Brush applied to a button style are kept; more precisely the Drawing Type and margins (9-scale) have to be set again on the button’s style)
- Ability to nudge position of a widget when it is selected using arrow keys on the keyboard. Possibly by the amount of grid snapping. I think this should come in very handy, especially in the case below.
- When having widgets stacked one over the other (in an overlay or canvas) you can’t select and move widgets that are in lower z order (layer). You can only select from hierarchy and move using the property fields. The feature above should come in handy.
- The Overlay widget. If I understood it correctly it should stack widgets each on its own layer. That’s very good, the problem is the layers can’t be reordered (not even through hierarchy view). This is a big issue when you change your mind over the position of a widget, or decide to add a background widget. You have to recreate the entire Overlay hierarchy. Not sure if the slate overlay widget support this reordering, if not it would come in handy there too, although i believe there is only a matter of sorting the children array.
- There’s is no multiselect. This is a big minus. If no marquee select, at least ctrl/alt+click should allow to do this. Both in the viewport and hierarchy view.
- Compiling a UserWidget in 4.5 Preview seems to take much more time than it used to in 4.4. The widgets tree dimension seems to have a big impact on the compile time. The bigger the children tree the higher the compiling time.
- The new layout constraints visual indicator goes over widgets placed in the corner. It makes it hard to see/select widgets in the corner, causing accidental clicks on the layout indicator.
- Ability to zoom in past 1 (100%). Should allow the ability to zoom in more, like 2,3…
- When working on a small widget, like a button, sometimes it’s hard to really know how it will look like in the real world when it stretches the entire size of the currently selected resolution. Allowing to set a custom size (just for design time) on the root container would help a lot.
Thanks for all the hard work.
There’s a new Custom option under the Resolutions list that lets you configure it (and it saves it in the asset, uses it if it exists…etc.).