Wrapping Unreal inside iOS app / Loading PDF

We are looking into using UE4 in an sales support situation where we have a 3D interactive map allowing the sales rep to move around to various aspects of the product range delivered by their company. When selecting a product range, the sales rep should be able to display a PDF detailing the various product features.

Before you say “why use PDF, render it as images” or something - the thing is, the PDFs will be in multiple languages, and they will be maintained by an advertising agency on behalf of the client. Thus we need to provide the ability to download, store and display the various PDFs.

In a “regular” app, this would not be a problem of course, I could simple include a PDF viewer. However, this is obviously not “center stage” functionality for UE4, so how could something like this be accomplished ?

Is there some way to incorporate a UE4 level into an XCode app and somehow communicate between the UE4 level and the app itself?

Any suggestions to other means of doing this ?

Kind regards,
Morten F. Thomsen

What I would suggest is to make it a normal UE4 app, and just work other UIViews into the hierarchy. You can place things on top of the UE4 “FIOSView” object (like we do with the four-finger-tap console dialog).

If you completely hide the UE4 view, then I would suggest freezing the main loop (not “pause” in the Unreal sense, but just stop letting the “while( !GIsRequestingExit )” loop in MainAppThread in IOSAppDelegate.cpp go (like we do when we get put into the background). That will help reduce CPU usage and what not while you aren’t showing 3D.

For communication, if you are using Blueprints, just make a new BP node type that is like “ShowPDF”, and then in C++ land, just call some function on the IOSAppDelegate or something to show the view.

Josh