Allar's Blog

How To Offset UE4 Pop-Up Notifications

I made a tutorial about how to move the notifications that the Unreal Engine editor can spew in case you... need to move them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4lpnOGt_M4

Now that the game industry is working from home...

... I hope more developers will have "spare time" for some "content creation".

C++

UE4 UMG UUserWidget: Which fires first, NativePreConstruct or Blueprint PreConstruct?

NativePreConstruct fires first. NativePreConstruct then fires Blueprint PreConstruct.

Editor

UE4 Editor limited to 60 FPS when not plugged into power (on battery)

As of Unreal Engine 4.24.1, the time this post was written, UE4's Editor will force itself to run at 60 FPS to prevent battery drain on any device that thinks it is currently running on some sort of battery. This appears to be Editor Only. There does not

Marketplace

Fixing UE4 Marketplace Comment Usernames Being Unknown

Today I was looking at the customer comments for my marketplace assets on the Unreal Engine Marketplace and found that across the entire site, usernames were being reported as "Unknown". For those who know my antics, I thought this was a perfect excuse to mess with the marketplace's

Opinion

Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter

Author's Note After Release I'm really blown away by the reception of this article. It has spread far wider than I could have ever imagined. The many comments and discussions it has prompted that essentially confirm what I believe is truth by not just fellow engineers but many in all

Dedicated Servers

Building Dedicated Server Target Files

In the middle of setting up a automated build server and I ran into an issue when trying to build dedicated servers for blueprint only projects. I basically needed to be able to auto-generate the *Server.Target.cs file for the project if its missing. I wrote an over engineered

Tutorials

Custom UE4 UMG "Screen Sizes" Configuration

Written using UE4 4.17 and 4.18 Preview, results my vary. Sometimes its useful to have your game UI work correctly with weird screen sizes that most players will never use. One example of this is if you frequently do multiplayer PIE testing where your client windows might have

UE4 Blueprints From Hell

A tumblr side project of mine that collects bad blueprints from people was just shared on 80.lv of all things, so theres that. Go ahead and submit your terrible blueprints.

UE4 4.15 to 4.16 ReadOnlyTargetRules Backwards Compatibility

If you're a marketplace plugin maintainer and would like to maintain backward compatibility between 4.16 and 4.15, you've most likely run into the issue of the change of module target files moving to a ReadOnlyTargetRules constructor. Epic has provided an undocumented preprocessor to help govern this change. #if

Tutorials

Should I Use Blueprints or C++?

This is a common question asked when people are new to Unreal Engine. This question is a good way to spark a tired debate. If you aren't able to make this decision for yourself I have created an easy to use guide. This guide is also helpful when you find

Tutorials

Populating Perforce With An Unreal Engine Source Build

This document covers how to set up a new Perforce server and populate it with an Unreal Engine source build alongside your projects. This is the most basic setup for 'beginner' Perforce pipelines and does not cover things like streams. Please note that you should only do this if you

Marketplace

Opinion on Epic's Unreal Engine 4 Marketplace: Issues

I want to start by making it very clear that I think the marketplace team is doing great and that Stephanie Markoff has been absolutely fantastic to work with. On September 3rd, 2014, the UE4 Marketplace was launched. I released my first asset on the marketplace on June 30th, 2015.

Tutorials

Updating UE4's Steam SDK

May 24, 2017 Update: Epic's 4.16 version of UE4 has had its Steam SDK upgraded to v1.39. This is still one version short of the latest SDK (v1.40) at the time of this writing but its significantly more recent. They even added SteamController fixes. I'm not sure

Tutorials

Enabling UE4's Steam Integration

This is the first step in a series of guides that will show you how to enable the OnlineSubsystemSteam module for your project. It does not cover session creation, session management, app id association, or anything specific to OnlineSubsystemSteam. These steps are the first part in enabling a Steam integration

Tutorials

Enabling UE4's Crash Video Recorder

Long time users of Unreal Engine 4 might remember an old feature that used be in the top right of the editor that would allow you to save the last 20 seconds of your editor's activity as an uncompressed .AVI. This recording would also auto-save on crash so that if

Marketplace

Custom UE4 Marketplace Frontend

After finding out accessing UE4 Marketplace data was possible, I made a pretty cool 'custom UE4 Marketplace front end' that mimics the launcher version of the UE4 Marketplace but with some additions I think many people would like such as searching, sorting, and seller YouTube embedding. If you would like

Marketplace

Creating a Custom UE4 Marketplace Frontend Experiment

This weekend I woke up late Saturday night and was working on an unrelated web project. This project was giving me some issues that required some HTTPS debugging using a tool called Fiddler. Fiddler is a great tool for reading HTTPS traffic. During my debugging, I caught glimpse of a

Tutorials

Align Blueprint Nodes Like A Pro

For those who haven't discovered this magic yet, blueprint alignment lets you clean up your blueprint graphs real quick. This alignment feature comes with no keyboard shortcuts bound out of the box, which is a real shame. If you want to step up your blueprint game though, I highly recommend

Tutorials

How To Set Up Completely Insecure Samba Shares on Linux (Ubuntu Server)

This document describes how to set up completely open, absolutely insecure, fully accessible Samba shares on Ubuntu Server. This is incredibly useful for rapid deployment testing from a Windows machine to a Ubuntu Server target as a deployment can be then done with a simple robocopy or even a "

Tutorials

How To Setup the Linux x86 Cross-Compile Toolchain for UE4 On Windows

This document serves as a lean and mean guide to setting up the Linux x86 Cross-Compile Toolchain for Windows. The process is already mostly animated by Epic but the existing documentation is a bit verbose. Requirements For 4.9.X or older, you need Visual Studio Community Edition 2013 For

Tutorials

How To Set Up Dedicated Servers for Windows and Linux For Your UE4 Game (using Windows)

This document covers the bare basics on how to get your Unreal Engine 4 game project able to build both Windows and Linux dedicated server builds, using just a Windows machine for compiling. Requirements For 4.9.X or older, you need Visual Studio Community Edition 2013 For 4.10

Tutorials

How to Convert a Blueprint Only Project to a C++ Project (using Windows)

This document covers how to convert a Blueprint Only project to a C++ project without writing any C++ code using Windows. This isn't intended to fold down your Blueprint Logic to C++, it is meant only to wrap your Blueprint Project with a C++ project. Some plugins and engine features

Experiments

Keyboard Shortcut (Hotkeys) for Unreal Engine 4

I made a custom WASD keycap set using the templates over at WASD Keyboards for my Das Keyboard. You can get the source vector files I made here on my github.

Tutorials

Get All Platform Dependencies Easily

If you plan on compiling Unreal Engine 4 across multiple platforms and don't want to have to deal with adding all the related dependencies per platform to your source control or making sure they are all in sync across platforms or simply don't want to run Setup.sh multiple times,