A Unreal Engine editor plugin which contains miscellaneous artist/developer utilities.
If common tasks can be automated or streamlined, they may end up in ScooterUtils.
Plugin currently contains:
- Screen Real Estate - found in the Editor Preferences under Plugins/Scooter Utilities
- Maximum FPS - found in Editor Preferences under Plugins/Scooter Utilities
- Restart Editor - From the Main Menu bar, choose File > Restart Editor...
- Show Project in Explorer - From the Main Menu bar, choose File > Show Project in Explorer
The persistent editor Settings, in Windows, are stored in this file:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\UnrealEngine\<EngineVersion>\Saved\Config\Windows\EditorSettings.ini
Once the plugin is built and loaded, you can find the Screen Real Estate setting by choosing Edit > Editor Preferences from the Main Menu bar, and then selecting Plugins/Scooter Utilities.
The Persistant Editor Scale value is a percentage relative to the default screen size of elements like fonts, buttons, and other widgets in the Unreal Engine UI. I like to work with all the fluff scaled down to about 80% of what's considered "normal," so I set the Persistant Editor Scale to 0.8.
This same setting is available in the Unreal Editor by going to the Main Menu bar, selecting Window > Developer Tools > Widget Reflector, and changing the Application Scale setting. However, the Widget Reflector method doesn't stick -- you have to set it everytime you restart Unreal Engine. The Scooter Utility writes this value to your Config file, so you don't have to constantly re-set it.
The Max FPS (Maximum Frames Per Second) setting is found in the Main Menu bar; Edit > Editor Preferences, then selecting Plugins/Scooter Utilities.
Max FPS overrides the console variable setting (t.MaxFPS) and sets
the engine's maximum editor frame rate. Like the Screen Real Estate setting
above, if you use t.MaxFPS, it will reset any time you shutdown or restart
the editor. Using the ScooterUtils Max FPS setting will be persistent and
stay set until you reset it. Set it to 0 to let the system take over the
default.
Turn off Smooth Frame Rate and Used Fixed Frame Rate under Edit > Project Preferences, General Settings/Framerate if you need to unclamp the system and run it as freewheeling as possible (These are off by default).
Restart Editor is found in the Main Menu bar, under File > Restart Editor....
This will shutdown and restart unreal engine, prompting you to save any unsaved changes, and reload your project on restart. This is the same behavior you see when you enable or disable a plugin.
This is for developers that need to frequently restart the engine to test code changes. It's also nice for those times you've been working in the editor for a while and things just start to feel... um... off. Just hit Restart Editor... and you're project will shutdown and restart -- no launcher popping up and prompting for what to load, and no searching in file explorer to find the uproject file to open.
Show Project in Explorer is found in the Main Menu bar, under File > Show Project in Explorer.
This will open file explorer in your main project folder -- i.e. the same folder as your project's .uproject file.
Being able to open the project in Explorer is nice for when you've opened a project from the Launcher and you need to know where it's actually stored on disk. You can also do this by right clicking on assets in the content browser, which will take you do your project's content folder, but this menu makes it a bit quicker to get to.
This is kind of standard practice for GitHub Unreal plugins; it goes like this:
- Create a new Unreal project.
- Create a
Pluginsfolder in your project directory. - Clone the GitHub repository (or grab and unzip the project) into your
Pluginsfolder. - Launch Unreal; You should be prompted to build the plugin.
- Optional: Use or convert your unreal project to a C++ project so that you can edit and build the code outside of Unreal.
This was my first plugin in Unreal Engine. It was inspired by a declined Epic Games Github Pull Request. It's very simple and direct -- I wanted to understand the bare bones of the system, so there's not a lot of bells-and-whistles in this code.
The plugin has two components, an IModuleInterface derived
FScooterUtilsModule, which bootstraps and provides basic life-support
to the plugin, and an IObject derived IScooterUtilsSettings
object which is the system-aware component that works directly
with Unreal's ISettingsModule and FSlateApplication's
ApplicationScale. The Module registers the callbacks and the
IObject manages the data and processes the callbacks.
First impressions, being new to the system: The system itself -- the thin veil between the editor and the code, between the UnrealBuildTool and the Artist -- brilliant. Conceptually, there is a hurdle -- there is no plugin api. You write your code to the entire surface of the application and all it's various plugins. -- and getting build dependencies figured is a very high bar, but those details should be in the background, and once they are, it takes very little hard coding to pull together the pieces you need to accomplish what you're after.
This plug-in was developed, built, and tested against Unreal Engine 4.25, 4.26, 4.27, 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, & 5.4. It should work on other platforms.
This plugin is source code only - I'm not currently providing binaries. If you're looking for binaries for the Windows version, contact me and I'll try get you a build. If you need an older build or another platform, I won't be able to build it for you, so you're going to have to get in touch with someone that can help you (See the Support/Contacts section below).
The source requires Visual Studio (I;ve used the free 2019 & 2022 community versionc) and either an Unreal C++ code (rather than blueprint) project or the full Unreal Engine 4 source code from GitHub (just use the project-based approach, it's so easy).
Building it inside a project is dead simple. Clone the repository into the Plugins directory of your Unreal C++ based project. Go to File, and select Update Visual Studio Project. From there, the plugin should be buildable, and once compiled, can be left in your project directory for the project you're working on, or copied into your Engine's main Plugins folder so it's available to all your future editing sessions.
If you are new to programming in UE, please see the official Programming Guide! The plugin development workflow is really very impressive, and if you've ever developed plugins for other applications, you should check it out.
- Please file an issue, or grab a fork, hack away, and submit pull requests.
- Contact me at linkedin.com/in/scottkirvan/
- You can also contact me at my discord server, I'm cptvideo.
To locate other developers, I recommend the # cpp and # engine-source channels on the Unreal Slackers Discord server.
- sign into the Unreal Engine Learning & Support area and take the Best Practices for Creating and Using Plugins course - it's great!
- This blog post on custom project settings is short, but it saved me when I got stuck
- The Unreal Team! I had only been learning Unreal for a little over a month when I first wrote this. I am so totally blown away. Epic's training material is outstanding - The sheer amount of material available, directly from Unreal, and being produced by end users, artists, and programmers is unlike anything I've ever experienced in the industry.
- Again, thanks to Caio Liberali for the original Pull Request on Github. I had been hacking around in the engine source trying to accomplish the same thing when the Pull Request came in. Had it not been declined, I probably never would have said, "hey, why not make it a plugin?"
Copyright (c) (2020): Scott Kirvan - All rights reserved
ScooterUtils is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License.
Project Link: ScottKirvan/ScooterUtils
CHANGELOG
TODO