UCLan Portfolio Blog

With the capability to add functions under the context menu it's time to try getting specific with what my tools are editing. You can change the class defaults of an editor action utility to only be shown when a specific class of object is selected within the content browser, therefore you can develop 20 different functions and the end user will only see 5-7 (because 13-15 of them are texture related) stopping information overload and errors from running incompatible functions.

  Not always a widget While adding a widget utility that has an interface is really good for new users or tools that need repeatable functions with differing values on each run, it is a huge development time consumption to create and manage the widgets interface and appearance. To skip all that you can make an "Action Utility" which on the backend works exactly like a widget based utility however the user can run it simply by right clicking with the mouse and selecting the the action they want to run out of the ones that appear on screen. The downside of this is while you can enable user input it is much more limiting then how widgets work and not as friendly to use. Asset or Actor action utility? This is a very important distinction to make as the action option will only show up in the relevant context menu and choosing the wrong kind of  utility base class will determine when your function option is shown.  An Asset action utility will appear in the context menu after a...