We have recently downloaded and exploring Unreal Engine 4 and hence totally new with this.We are familiar with rendering engines as we have our own
render engine written in DX/C++. From what I gathered that we need to use the Unreal Editor to create any of the our games or any thing we may require and the eventually
we can build that to a binary exe. The question I have is weather can we use the Unreal Engine rather host it in our very own application and use it to render . Is that Possible?
The documentation is massive need pointers or samples if any.
Sorry, I can’t find it…I do recall the guy had managed to use the ue4 viewport in a windows form application…I have a mental image of the software being yellow in colour…Perhaps I dreamt it??
It is possible to do this, but we don’t have any tutorials or examples for it. For UE3 I had written an ActiveX control that could host a viewport for use inside web browsers. In UE4, this process should be much simpler as the Engine is now much more modular, and we have removed much of the static/global variables crud. It is still going to be a complex task though. I think you will end up copying much of LaunchEngineLoop.cpp, which is one of the few files that are almost intractable.
If your Engine is based on C++ and DirectX, you may also want to explore the other way around, i.e. writing a UE4 application that hosts your engine.
I vaguely recall someone integrating UE4 into a WPF application, but I can’t find it right now either. Try Google!
The primary motive is to explore the UE engine and use it to render instead of using our engine as it gives the possibility of whole new features effects which are already implemented in unreal.I learnt about UDK thinking its Unreal development kit
and will give library access to host the Unreal engine but its not that and also its only for UE3. The steps I had in mind was to that we invoke the unreal engine in a windows app perhaps and create objects ,get material put textures and have
effects along with animations and all what is available.Would have wanted to open the project created in UE4 Editor in our Application using the Unreal engine and render instead of having a deployable exe which the editor builds.
There was another way of using the Plugins to get access to Unreal Device and add/modify functionality but that’s not what we want.