So, I’ve noticed that certain types, Vector being the best example, allow you to spawn 3D widgets in the world. This is quite handy, but the vector widget doesn’t quite suit my needs (for one thing, I’d like to be able to disable specific widgets from script, in order to aid visibility of those widgets I’m interested in). Is there a way to, at the least, disable specific widgets from blueprints? For example, I’m using these vector widgets to position the vertices of two meshes, which are quite nearby. It would be helpful to be able to disable the widgets from one mesh, in order to focus on the other. As it currently stands, it appears this is not possible. In the best case, it would be most useful to be able to create my own widget, including specifying its behaviour, as this would allow me to craft it to better suit my needs.
It seems editor customisation is very limited in UE4, on the whole. One of the key elements of making a game is constructing the tools to make the level designer’s job easier, and it seems that Unreal, while it has a lot of features built-in, doesn’t allow much room for this.
In general, the ability to create editor-only scripts, including the ability to place handles into the editor window that can control various values, would be a massive improvement on the editor functionality, in my opinion. Still, it’s good to know that this can be done with C++, but a shame that it’s so difficult.
We call them Gizmos in the engine, but yes - the long and short of it is that we don’t expose enough hooks to make it easy to control them. You can create new editor modes in C++ and in those you can do any arbitrary thing you want. But creating them is difficult, and not really recommended unless you are implementing a big new mode like, Mesh Painting.
The editor is pretty extensible on the whole via plugins, but the viewports remain a very legacy bit of the engine that does a lot of things that are not extensible except through these C++ Editor Modes.
In the future we’d like to make more of this stuff a lot easier to do with minimal code, so we welcome any feedback you have on all the things you’d like to be able to extend.
Cheers,
Nick
Out of curiosity when you say scripts - are you hoping for editor only blueprints, or something else?
Either works, but blueprints are probably best if aiming for ease-of-use.