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Editor Utilities Project - Week #1 - Asking Around & Initial Research


What Is a Utility?

An "Editor Utility" is a blueprint visual script of code that can only be used within the Unreal Engine project editor and will be ignored upon packaging. This allows studios to add custom tools or functions to their projects containing actions that unreal engine already has. The value in this is by adding a tool onto the context menu of, lets say a static mesh, the individual developer can for example, set a series of LOD's for a large group of static meshes all with much more ease as the alternative is to open each of the static mesh assets 1 by 1 then manually add each individual LOD. These tools can be incredibly powerful as not only can they do anything a regular actor blueprint in Unreal Engine can do but they can also retrieve functions and options from within the engine's subsystems (which a regular blueprint can't always do), meaning that any of the options seen by a development staff member in the details panel or various context menu's can be added into a Editor Utility and automated with the click of a single button.


What To Make?

To start off I went around asking my classmates if they had any gripes with the way Unreal Engine handles things and if they had any ideas of what aspects of the engine they would like to improve. From the answers they gave me I wrote them down as possible tools and filtered out anything I thought was either too advanced for me or would go as deep as needing to re-compile Unreal Engine was marked on my list as too advanced for me too implement.

I organised all these ideas and list's on a Trello board then labelled each idea with a colour that represents how easily I believe I could achieve that specific functionality. Organising my tasks this way helps me orient myself with the project each time I sit down to continue development as I can see both what I was working on last time as well as what I wish to implement along with how large of a task I expect that implementation to be.

Using Trello to organise my ideas and tasks this way allows me to quickly address which tools I have time to work on and develop.

Link To Trello Board



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