slate

[grave hatch]

std::shared_ptr etc

[frigid gazelle]

oh thats interessting

[grave hatch]

But you'll have a hard time using those with UE systems - like slate, for example.

They all use the UE smart pointers.

And they are not compatibel.

[frigid gazelle]

yes but its interessting for third party libs

[grave hatch]

Yeah.

[frigid gazelle]

thanks a lot 🙂

[grave hatch]

Np

The lighthouse link in the pinned messages has a lot more info on shared ptrs.

[split maple]

I keep these variables as private members and use raw pointers (without UPROPERTY to prevent garbage collection). However, I encountered an address violation only when pressing F11, which suggests there might be an issue with how I added the widget to the game viewport. @grave hatch, if you have some time, could you explain how to correctly add a widget to the game viewport? I want to make sure I'm doing it properly.

[grave hatch]

Not sure, honestly? I don't work with games that much.

It might be that you get a violation when you hit f11 because that's when the widget is re-rendered. If it's not rendered every tick, you won't get an error.

Storing UAssets (or any UObject) on teh heap in a raw pointer is a terrible idea.

[fluid jewel]

Thanks for the help. Was able to achieve the results i was looking for

[split maple]

When it’s re-render its possible that something is assigning again brush to image or something else?

[grave hatch]

Or the brush has simply been GC'd.

[split maple]

It’s impossible cuz GC doesn’t know that USlateStyleAsset* slate exists

I think that widget could be just GC

[grave hatch]

Of course it knows UStyleStyleAsset exists.

It knows about all UObjects.

[split maple]

Wait wait I lost my mind

I don’t know what I’m writing xd

[grave hatch]

Lol

[split maple]

Auto correct 👍🏾

So in function construct should I add to root brush?

To prevent GC

[grave hatch]

Create TStrongObjectPtrs on your widget and assign them to that...

[split maple]

Ok thx ☺️

[grave hatch]

Of course, that may not be the problem.

But it's a good start.

[split maple]

@grave hatch Im cooked , because today I decided to remove these lines of code just for fun and after that I don't get the message about the address violation🤨 ``` + SConstraintCanvas::Slot()
.Anchors(FAnchors(0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f))
.Offset(FMargin(-40.0f, -45.0f, 80.0f, 80.0f))

          .Alignment(FVector2D(0.0f, 0.0f))
          [
              SNew(SImage)
          ]
           ```

[split maple]

I solved my problem and I have mind blow. I don't know but when I create SNew probably I have to add at least 1 element for example : SNew(SImage)
.ColorAndOpacity(FSlateColor(FLinearColor(1,1,1,1)))

I've reverted to a previous state (when the address violations occurred) and now everything magically works. Any suggestions as to why?

[grave hatch]

Magic

[split maple]

@grave hatch I want to make a complex main menu (in slate of course :D) that I might use in my game and my question is, is it a good idea to first make it in UMG and then rewrite it to slate? If that's not a good idea (I suspect it's a terrible idea), could you give me some cool tips how to do it?

[grave hatch]

Erm. I don't really have to worry about that so I have no idea. I don't touch umg. 🙂

I really must finish my wysiwyg slate editor...

[split maple]

I just want to visual for me look of main menu 😄 and I don't know what to do now

[grave hatch]

You can always use both. Make uwidgets in c++ with named slots to put umg elements.

[pallid gyro]

I think slate shines when you want to create non-trivial 'data relationships' between widgets and other objects, if you have a widget that takes some object and uses its data to construct a bunch of widgets that are all synced to the object it is much easier to do in slate, but actual visual design is naturally easier in UMG with the widget designer and all the other various editor goodies, using the 'bind widget' functionality and some cpp classes it's completly possible to create a 'data scaffold' in slate and keep the design fully flexible in UMG

[grave hatch]

What he said!

[frigid gazelle]

how are lambdas in Slate Widgets updated? every tick? for example:

for a SButton

 .IsEnabled_Lambda([this]()
     {
         if (!TestSubSystem->CheckForValidPath(Path) && bWasChanged == true)
         {
             ColorStatus = FColor::Red;
             StatusString = FString("Path is not Valid");
             return false;
         }
         if (TestSubSystem->CheckForExistingFolder(Path))
         {
             ColorStatus = FColor::Red;
             StatusString = FString("Folder Already Exists");
             return false;
         }

         ColorStatus = FColor::Cyan;
         StatusString = FString("Path is Valid");
         return true;
     })

[cinder oriole]

Just my understanding a lambda isn’t very different from dedicated/member function, they’ll get called in the same way or as frequently

for your case that’s probably when “IsEnabled()” is called… if nothing is calling that your lambda won’t get called… its just a function bound to a delegate.. delegate doesn’t trigger, lamda doesn’t trigger

[frigid gazelle]

yeah that is true, but when i change the input of another slot (where i input path) the IsEnabled directly updates accordingly, so i guess it must evaluate my if statements on every tick

i have a slot which is a SButton

 SNew(SButton)
     .Text(LOCTEXT("Button2", "Setup Test Folder"))
     // Check for Validation of Path
     .IsEnabled_Lambda([this]()
         {
             if (!TestSubSystem->CheckForValidPath(Path) && bWasChanged == true)
             {
                 ColorStatus = FColor::Red;
                 StatusString = FString("Path is not Valid");
                 return false;
             }
             if (TestSubSystem->CheckForExistingFolder(Path))
             {
                 ColorStatus = FColor::Red;
                 StatusString = FString("Folder Already Exists");
                 return false;
             }

             ColorStatus = FColor::Cyan;
             StatusString = FString("Path is Valid");
             return true;
         })
     // On Click Execute Folder Creation
     .OnClicked_Lambda([this]()
         {
             TestSubSystem->CreateFolder(Path);
             return FReply::Handled(); 
         })

with these lambdas and another slot with a SEditableText which sets the "Path Variable"

 + SHorizontalBox::Slot()
 .FillWidth(5)
 [
     SNew(SEditableText)
         .ColorAndOpacity(FSlateColor::FSlateColor(FColor::Cyan))
         .AllowContextMenu(true)
         .IsCaretMovedWhenGainFocus(true)
         .SelectAllTextOnCommit(true)
         .SelectAllTextWhenFocused(true)
         .HintText(LOCTEXT("HintText1", "Enter Path e.g. /Game/Testing/"))
         .Text(LOCTEXT("FolderPath1", "/Game/EDTesting/"))
         .OnTextChanged_Lambda([this](const FText& NewText)
             {
                 bWasChanged = true;
                 Path = NewText.ToString();
             })
 ]

and when i change the editableText my Text which i show next to my button immediatly updates, thats why i thought i would evaluate on tick

[grave hatch]

Yes, they are evaluated every tick.

Try to use events, rather than bindings, if you can.

[frigid gazelle]

so for example in my case to use the "OnTextChanged" delegate for my textfield

[split maple]

@grave hatch Do you know whether converter from UMG to slate exists? I came up with idea that I can do it if it doesn't exist XD something like generator of huge code

[grave hatch]

I suppose. I mean the other way around, too. Instead of binding to a method to get a value, use an external event to set the value on the widget when you know it has changed.

[split maple]

@grave hatch I have a problem, in the progress bar in UMG I have a variable called "Is Marquee" but I can't find it in Slate. Why? lol

fr it's probably variable of UMG not slate

Ok, I probably figured out what this is. It's a variable that determines whether a percentage has a value but in slate you have to do it manually. Idk why i'm writing it here

[grave hatch]

🙂

[split maple]

@grave hatch I started making converter UMG to Slate X D (yes, I am masochist)

[grave hatch]

Lol

[split maple]

I resigned XDDDDDDDDDDDD I made a 2k line function that returns "code" but as strings like .Value(%ff) (TUTORIAL ON HOW TO WASTE LIFE FROM MIDNIGHT TO 3PM :D)

[shell silo]

Not sure this goes here, but I am trying to create a custom graph node by inherting from UEdGraphNode. I want to be able to place this new node on any graph, not on a custom graph but in any. I cannot use k2nodes as if I am not mistaken they are only for bluerprints. So far I got a class inhertiting from UEdGraphNode and another one from SGraphNodeResizable. Do you know where or how do I register my new node so that it appears on teh context menu. I think it has to be something related to FGraphNodeFactory as it calls FNodeFactory::CreateNodeWidget, which is where nodes are spanwed, but I am a bit lost. Any idea?

[split maple]

ask chat gpt 🔥 (I have never made a k2nodes)

[shell silo]

chatgpt just gives non senses, happens quite a lot when dealing with unreal API as it suggests inexistent code that gets from random githubs i suppose

[stuck jewel]

Sorry... what? You want to make a node that magically works with any graph?

[shell silo]

You know the comment node? the same but I would run my own logic in there. Just wanna be able to place it in any kind of graph. Shouldnt be that hard, I just dont know if it is doable without engine mod

[stuck jewel]

why didn't you look up how comments do it? i don't think they have one class, i'm sure they're all unrelated "copies" of the same thing. maybe with a common parent for the common slate functionality?

[shell silo]

thats what I am trying to, but I cannot find how to hook up my class into the factory

[tribal bolt]

omg, PLEASE

[grave hatch]

The aim is that'll produce compileable c++ code too.

And it saves/loads the slate tree as json right now.

I did 90% of the actual coding, got to the bit where I'm making the UI for it and kinda stopped 😦

I need the slate builder to make the slate builder! 😄

[faint oriole]

How could I go about implementing a custom pin type for UEdGraphs where there is no concept of input/output, and every pin can connect to every other pin? Should I just not check for the pin's direction in the schema's CanCreateConnection() function?

[fluid jewel]

now that's a patreon i'd be willing to sub to 😉

[pallid gyro]

Feels like a silly question but so far whenever I did something like this I implemented it through a tick event and I'm wondering if there's a simpler option: I need to create some 'activity monitor' indicators, really any simple element that will change colors briefly whenever some event is fired and then revert/fade-out after a brief amount of time; I'm very much a dev noob and I know that unity has things like 'co-routines' but I don't know what's the unreal equivalent, or maybe there's even some ready-made slate option. Any thoughts?

like evne in BP I could possibly set this easily with a timeline, but in cpp I literally have no idea how to do it without some variable that decrements every tick

[pallid gyro]

Yeah, just implementing the functionality you want in CanCreateConnection and TryCreateConnection in the Schema and on the node's PinConnectionListChanged, pins can be bi directional.

The default SGraphNode will split the pins to the LeftNodeArea and RightNodeArea or however they are called based on the pin direction, and schemas can use the direction (and any other data) you store in the PinType struct, but that's really all the direction does. If your CanCreateConnection always returns CONNECT_RESPONSE_MAKE all pins will be connectable

[grave hatch]

Google the ue5coro library

[faint oriole]

How do you set the "Size to content" value of a Canvas slot in slate?

[split maple]

my tactic for rewriting UMG to slate: just write the variable name from UMG when creating the property

or find it in class for example : I want to find a Alignment so im doing something like that (look at image) if that doesnt' work im going to class and try to find my target property (look at image)

And you can see that SizeToContent is AutoSizeAttr

[grave hatch]

The api docs are really good for finding this stuff out too.

Sadly they api docs search is horrific.

[faint oriole]

Thanks!

[faint oriole]

What's the purpose of FOptionalPinFromProperty

[grave hatch]

I guess something like 'world context' where it's optionally provided if world context can't be gotten from the context.

[pallid gyro]

It looks to me like it is used by a helper interface FOptionPinManager that is used in some k2 nodes that have optional pins that are constructed from uproperties, but I'm kinda just guessing by looking at its usages, it doesn't seem like this feature is used all that much, only in a handful of mostly animation related nodes.

the make struct node uses it, for instance.

[faint oriole]

What's the difference between a SLATE_ARGUMENT and SLATE_ATTRIBUTE

[grave hatch]

An argument is a one time thing. It's a value.

An attribute can be either a value or a delegate.

Technically you could specify an argument to be a delegate type, but why would you when you have attributes...

So, for instance, an argument would be a style (since you really poll fro new styles...)

But the size of an image or enabled/visibility state might be an attribute as that's commonly calculated each tick.

Also, you can add mandatory construction parameters directly to the Construct function.

E.g. void Construct(const FArguments& Args, USomeObject* ThisIsARequiredArgument)

Then you do SNew(SYourWidget, SomeObjectInstance);

[obtuse prairie]

what is the diff between UEditorUtilityWidgetBlueprint and UEditorUtilityWidget
sounds like UEditorUtilityWidgetBlueprint has no designer
but all examples i see on how to run a editor utility widget in c++ a is using UEditorUtilityWidgetBlueprint

[grave hatch]

I have no idea.

[primal bison]

Do collapsed widgets use performance they shoudlent be included in state prepass and paint right as thier not hit testable or visible when collapsed asking as im making a widget pool system

[grave hatch]

Hidden still get prepassed, so take resources. Collapsed do not.

Though if something has ticking enabled, it'll probably still tick when collapsed.

[faint oriole]

How can I go about binding a delegate for when a node is selected in a graph (So I can update a details panel to show node details)

[grave hatch]

Details panels generally work by following the selection. You might find that the global selection objects contain the node when it is selected.

But that's just a guess.

[pallid gyro]

It's one of the 'AdditionalGraphCommands', most of the graphs in the editor have this functionality, something like OnNodesSelected(TArray<UObject*>) it exists all over the place.

And yeah usually the actual mechanism is that there's a details panel and the selected objects are being set as an object array to the details panel (which with the right settings can support multi selection).

Here's how I did it in my shitty graph, I use a single property viewer that just watches a TArray property cause it was easier to set up and I was lazy, but this is the method you need to implement - https://github.com/Amir-BK/unDAW/blob/bbeb294842a1880c12c244527151b8c8d2f4ac36/Source/BKEditorUtilities/Private/SequenceAssetEditor/UnDAWSequenceEditorToolkit.cpp#L234

And here's binding it to the graph delegate - https://github.com/Amir-BK/unDAW/blob/bbeb294842a1880c12c244527151b8c8d2f4ac36/Source/BKEditorUtilities/Private/SequenceAssetEditor/UnDAWSequenceEditorToolkit.cpp#L295

[prisma gulch]

Hiyas!
Is there any way to achieve this behavior with normal UPROPERTY/Meta specifiers?
https://i.gyazo.com/a00f5b0547f9b67f441682f293f9bb73.gif

Basically there's a class selection, but properties of the class are shown, based on the class. Unity has this feature

For unreal all I can think of are having ALL properties available and just hiding them based on the class selection, but that's not very elegant and might not even work.

[pallid gyro]

I think UPROPERTY(Instanced) ?

[prisma gulch]

It works 😄 BUT, how do I now access the changes made to those variables? They are gone when using NewObject

[prisma gulch]

Edit: Answer is Cast<UObjectSubclass>(object->GetDefaultObject())->YourChangedVaraible

[grave hatch]

You're changing the CDO variables in the details panel?

That sounds pretty suspect.

[faint oriole]

Thanks! Super useful.

[faint oriole]

Working through that and I'm just having trouble actually getting the selected nodes. You're using Graph->SelectedNodes but no built in graphs have this property it seems, or at least rider can't find them. Is SelectedNodes something you built in or am I being blind?

[pallid gyro]

Yes, the array is mine, did you implement the method I pointed you to?

You need to bind to the SGraphEditor delegate - https://github.com/Amir-BK/unDAW/blob/bbeb294842a1880c12c244527151b8c8d2f4ac36/Source/BKEditorUtilities/Private/SequenceAssetEditor/UnDAWSequenceEditorToolkit.cpp#L295

The delegate function will contain the const TSet<UObject*>& SelectedNodes, those are the selected nodes, I also store them in an array, cause it's easy, but other graphs probably just pass them to the details panel.

[faint oriole]

Ohh, I see, I was being blind. For some reason I didn't figure that last bit out lol, sorry

Got it working, thank you!

[pallid gyro]

The humble 3rd party editor extension plugins are often easier to follow than the fancy epic graphs.

[stuck jewel]

this statement triggers some yellow flags for me. you're reading the blueprint data when you do this, not that object's own copy of the instanced UObject. which might be what you want, but it feels weird without some context

(might have to move to C++ if there's actually anything to talk about but anyway)

[prisma gulch]

Yeah that's exactly what I want lol. If there's a proper way to do it i'd love to hear it. Doubt it would be more than just 1 line anyway

[stuck jewel]

sure, yeah that's the correct way to read the source blueprint data.

[prisma gulch]

No I'm saying what you described is what I want, to read the instanced UObject

I didn't know such a thing was possible, but feels like the correct way to do it

Perhaps even to create that object with it's instanced data already set?

[stuck jewel]

your code reads the blueprint (i.e. Content folder asset)

which, again, may be what you want

the instanced UObject is part of the blueprint, but also obviously spawned blueprints have their own copies

the whole point of Instanced UObjects is to be able to change the variables but not just in the blueprint, also (possibly) in the level -- just like any other variable of a class -- i was just making sure you weren't having some misconception about that

[prisma gulch]

Oh, meaning the changes persist through gameplay?

[prisma gulch]

My goal was to only display/modify vars corresponding with the selected class (for clarity)

But would then create those objects however needed, and pass the vars into them. No different than the shake class shown above. You modify only what matters, but can create any number of shakes.

Is that the correct use case? Or am I still not getting something

[stuck jewel]

yeah that's all fine

[prisma gulch]

ex: I have Item > Behavior. The Behavior vars will changed based on which one is selected. But you can create 50 of those items that all function independently. The vars are just set initially only but may change with the Item as any other object

Just trying to understand the real purpose of instanced classes

Because googling nearly anything in unreal gives no information lol

[stuck jewel]

this is it. compositing behavior using component-like subobjects

[prisma gulch]

Oh right nm I just reread things and understand it sort of behaves like a struct -- a part of the owning class, as apposed to it's own uniqe thing.

[shrewd finch]

Hey does anyone have any good links for a general slate tutorial.. I've got some stuff up and running but mostly with the help of Copilot.. the main problem I'm having is trying to get a material sprite sheet to work.. it works fine in UMG, but when I set the brush image in Slate it is still.. I'd welcome any tutorials that are just general Slate workings

[prisma gulch]

Oh btw it looks like instanced is not correct for this application.. It only allows 1 copy of the data.

So when I make multiple assets with an instanced object on them, they all share the exact same data. That's not how the shake class works 😦

https://i.gyazo.com/0823aa2a0de91672805392be5ea41eb8.mp4

[pallid gyro]

What is the uproperty? it seems like you're editing class defaults rather than a new instanced object, besides, why not look at the header where that shake thing is?

it should be a UPROPERTY you can easily see how it's set up

[prisma gulch]

I tried both Instanced and EditInline, both can be accessed through code -- but also are shared globally lol

Ah, I don't have the source code, and I don't think VScode would be able to search it properly. Do you know of an online resource that shows the source?

[pallid gyro]

What is the property? you called it Subclass, implying it might be TSubClassOf<>, I think you want it to be a simple TObjectPtr<>

[prisma gulch]

Oh

[pallid gyro]

yes, join the epic github org and you'll have access to the source repo

you can also download the code via the launcher

[prisma gulch]

TSubclassOf<UTileState> TileStateSubclass;

I spawn the object and then fill it with the data from that blueprint

[prisma gulch]

Awesome, don't have much space on my laptop so I like the idea of online docs

[pallid gyro]

a TSubClassOf property is a class property, like the purple variables in BP, you want it to be an object property I believe.

basically TSubClass of is saying "this property will be the name of a class that is derived from T", you want "this property is an instance of an object derived from T"

[prisma gulch]

Ah okay gotcha, seems like it can no longer be created with NewObject

[pallid gyro]

This may depend on other factors as well, the camera shakes are probably instances of objects that exist as assets in the content browser

[prisma gulch]

They are, and that's exactly what I'm trying to achieve

[pallid gyro]

So, if the objects don't exist (as BP classes, assets, cpp classes, etc) you'd expect that TObjectPtr<UMyBaseClass> to be empty

wherein TSubClassOf will show you a list of classes

TSubClassOf is usually used to instantiate new objects of a certain class

[prisma gulch]

Yeah that's exactly what happened lol, empty TObjectPtr

[pallid gyro]

https://benui.ca/unreal/uproperty/

ah sorry

[prisma gulch]

TSubClassOf worked perfectly, especially with the "Instanced" properly you suggested earlier, however it just shares all the values

[pallid gyro]

https://benui.ca/unreal/uproperty/#instanced

you need your classes to be editinlinenew and stuff

[prisma gulch]

Lol that site is already the first bookmark on my browser 😛

[pallid gyro]

that will allow you to create a new instance of the class from the object picker

[prisma gulch]

Oh, trying editinlinenew

[pallid gyro]

Really having access to the source code and looking at the example of the functionality you're trying to achieve is invaluable here, it makes the whole thing a simple process of elimination

[prisma gulch]

Oh nope, didn't affect anything

Yeah I'm gonna hop to that

Thanks for the unreal github suggestion btw!

[pallid gyro]

And this is even more pertinent with slate widgets, cause google is useless (gives you incorrect answers from 5 years ago) and even Ben's wonderful website is nowhere close to being comprehensive, the editor source code (with the help of the widget reflector widget) is the most valuable documentation by far.

[prisma gulch]

Oh, well wuddya know, turns out I already have the engine source installed 🤦‍♂️

[prisma gulch]

Haha yeah. I've resorted to chatgpt for most of my questions, which is a bit better than google, but also mostly incorrect

[pallid gyro]

Mmm, I don't know if it's better than google, I pay for copilot and it's largely only good for auto-completing boilerplate and some c++ syntax, the unreal editor lets you jump to class and function definitions, the widget reflector helps you find the slate code that's actually spawning a visible widget, and the various search functions in the IDE can show you the actual hierarchy (not to mention breakpoints and the such). Getting comfortable with slate really is just getting comfortable with looking for the epic implementations in the source code yourself.

[prisma gulch]

Btw you were indeed correct -- Instanced on the TSubobject, and EditInlineNew within the uobject class -- will have to dig deeper why it doesn't work for me.

But yeah your right! Now that I know I have the source, definitely gonna be sniffing through it more often. Thanks man 🙂

[prisma gulch]

Ah figured it out! So here was the issue:

UObject* did not work, as it's just an object.

So I was using TSubObjectOf<BlueprintObject>() with inline. And the reason everything shared the value, is because everything was changing the values of BlueprintObject.. they all modified the same base object in the content browser.

adding EditInlineNew, DefaultToInstanced (unsure if both needed) allowed UObject* to be edited in the editor, and properly be instanced! Woopwoop!

[faint oriole]

Whats a good way of creating brushes at runtime using a variable texture? Should I just have some base brush and whenever I need a variant I just FSlateImageBrush NewBrush = BaseBrush and then modify NewBrush's image source?

[dusk moth]

What parent class would be the best for things like a main menu or a hud? There are not many modern tutorials on youtube and in the few that are available some use the hud parent class, some the user widget parent class und nobody talks about the slate widget parent class

[grave hatch]

AHUD?

[dusk moth]

the thing with the hud parent class is, that it supposedly only has very simple functions and is somewhat deprecated (?)

[grave hatch]

It's not deprecated at all.

The thing with HUD is that it's a good wrapper for a HUD.

It's not where you actually make your hud, it's just like the "manager" class.

Add your widgets to the screen there, handle events and the interface between the actual hud/widgets and the player.

[dusk moth]

Understood so the hud class is the place where everything that i create is managed. Next step is to find out how to create stuff that can be managed

[grave hatch]

😛

You probably want to work with #umg for game huds.

[dusk moth]

but isnt umg the blueprint version? Id like to try and use as much c++ as i can in my current project. I wanna find out if its suitable for me or if i should stay with umg and only use c++ for gameplay stuff

[grave hatch]

Slate is terrible for iterating on UI 😛

But sure you can do it.

[dusk moth]

So its better to use slate for extending the editor like a new toolbar functionality but when it comes to game UIs i should stick with umg?

[grave hatch]

That's the general consensus.

You don't really get slate-based ui libraries aimed at games.

So common ui is in umg.

For instance.

[dusk moth]

Good. Im acutally glad you said that because the more i look into slate the more i feel like this is a topic i should not touch if im not serious about creating my own plugins/extending the engine itself lol

you really are a wizard

[grave hatch]

🙂

[dusk moth]

May i ask if you work in a studio or something like that?

[grave hatch]

Sort of?

I work for a tech company that subcontracts for Epic. I do tool development.

(in Slate)

[dusk moth]

So if i ask something about c++ or more specific slate i can rely on your answers being correct. Awesome

[grave hatch]

...in general...

I don't really do anything with blueprints or games, so my knowledge about adding new k2 nodes (bp nodes) is very limited, for instance.

And adding a Slate widget to a game ui? Shrug

[dusk moth]

lmao

[late rain]

Hi, all
I want to disable gamma correction of UImage.
My render target does not apply gamma correction, but It does on my UI.
How should I do?

[grave hatch]

For U-stuff, try #umg.

In the past I've had to "unapply" the gamma to the image in a material or something. I'm not sure if you can specifically turn it off for individual elements.

[faint oriole]

What's the class for a widget used to modify a specific data type in a property viewer called again? Like the text box for strings. material picker for static meshes, inline curve editor etc

[faint oriole]

Oh is it ILayoutDetails

[faint oriole]

I think its IDetailCustomization :P

[grave hatch]

😛

Best to look at something that already has a customisation with the widget reflector.

[dusk moth]

Can someone help me with this error? everything compiles just fine but its still annoying

i solved it by making it a pointer?

no because then other code breaks

the error goes away when i include the necessary header file. But is a forward declaration not enough?

[grave hatch]

Is that a compile error or an intellisense error?

You can ignore intellisense errors.

[dusk moth]

intellisense. Weird thing is i have the same pointer as a variable but its not complaining there. only when i use it with this slate argument

Guess rider is not as perfect as i imagined it. It also has problems detecting unused engine headers. Hope they fix that stuff because everything else is awesome, its just small bugs like that

[faint oriole]

If I wanted to make a custom widget for modifying a TArray if the array is of a specific class, how could I go about doing that?

Not as in a custom widget for each array element, but for the array itself

[pallid gyro]

mmm, many ways, depending on how customizable you need it to be, a DetailsViewer is fully capable of editing a TArray of UObjects, the objects you pass to it are up to you, the details viewer will show the 'details' for a given object, which will generally its UPROPERTies based on their accessibility/visibly specifiers (editanywhere, visiblenywhere, etc).

But it's also possible to create a custom widget that takes some TArray<UMyObject> as an argument or an attribute and does anything with it, like dynamically populating an SVerticalBox based on the contents of the array

[grave hatch]

I'm assuming she means a specific UPROPERTY that's a tarray of some data type.

[pallid gyro]

So a property viewer?

A property viewer for a property with right meta/specifiers is pretty customizable, TArrays have a bunch of options that affect how they are displayed

[grave hatch]

I assume she wants a completely different widget in the standard editor details panel.

I.e a details customisation which she's been asking about.

[faint oriole]

Sorry for the late response and my general cluelessness - yes, I want to create a widget which can modify an array property inside of a details panel (sorry if i'm getting the names for all these details / property things wrong or mixed up) if the array's contents is of a specific class. For example, (this is not my use case, just an example) if the array is of TArray<FVector2D>, show a graph that has a dot for each array element at the coordinates that it's vector holds.

That's just an example though - dont worry about the implementation of the graph thing lol - all I really want to know is:

how can I detect that a TArray is of a given class (SPECIFICALLY a TArray, I don't want this widget on instances of the class, just arrays of the class. If that's impossible I'll just make a wrapper class for the array and detect that instead) and replace the standard array property editor with a custom widget.

[grave hatch]

I believe details customisations have a "can I customise this?" check on them.

Or the registration method does.

Something like that.

virtual void RegisterCustomPropertyTypeLayout( FName PropertyTypeName, FOnGetPropertyTypeCustomizationInstance PropertyTypeLayoutDelegate, TSharedPtr<IPropertyTypeIdentifier> Identifier = nullptr); - the Identifier has a "IsPropertyTypeCustomised"

Though I'm not sure if that specific method would let you customise a TArray...

[faint oriole]

I see. I've got that working now for array elements, now to see if its possible to apply it to arrays itself... Surely it must be, I mean, the engine does it itself :P

[stuck jewel]

make a new struct, like FVector2DArrayWrapper, which contains your TArray<FVector2D>... and build a Property Type Customization to draw your example graph idea, and then draw your normal array editor as well

then if you want it fully generic... good luck, i say: just don't 😄

otherwise if you think the engine does this already somewhere, you find an example and (we) study it

[grave hatch]

I looked at this yesterday and there's just a list of "can I render this?" checks in FDetailItem and the array renderer is the first one checked

I don't even know if it accepts customisations.

[faint oriole]

Oh, In that case then I will just do the wrapper thingy

[grave hatch]

You could save yourself some code changes by making the wrapper implicitly convert to the inner array too. _This being a good idea or not is a separate issue 😛 _

operator TArray<FYourDataType>&() { return array; } (and a const one)

Or adding a operatior-> to return the array ptr.

[faint oriole]

It's no big deal - not much code will have to be changed

[faint oriole]

https://lxjk.github.io/2019/10/01/How-to-Make-Tools-in-U-E.html#_create_a_tab_window

Found this absolute holy grail of a tutorial

It covers so much

[grave hatch]

Nice.

Thanks!

[stuck jewel]

new users beware: studying this won't be nearly as fun as spending 7 hours trying to figure out how to change left justified text to centre justified via the traditional hunt-and-peck trial-and-error slate learning method

[grave hatch]

That's eaaasy. Just set the alignment of the containing slot! 🙂

[stuck jewel]

it's easy once you know, but don't dare pretend that back in the day you didn't pack 3 days of rations to prepare for your journey into the slate undercodebelly to discover how to actually perform this magic

[grave hatch]

Unless you've got some min width on the text. That will fuck you.

[grave hatch]

There are still some dragons to be slayed.

Like I was trying to get a text block to clip earlier. I gave up in the end.

I surrounded it with an Sbox, set a width override and set the clip to always. Just merrily kept going past it.

[pallid gyro]

had a very similar experience with the SWrapBox, when I used it in my graph node it behaved bizzarly when zooming out of the graph (it would become small and misaligned and then wouldn't revert to its original size, if I zoomed out first and created the widget it was fine), solution? "okay so a simple SBox it is"

It seems to me like the interactions between different containers in the hierarchy are one of the hardest to predict things in slate

[faint oriole]

On that note, how?

it's just .Justification(ETextJustify) right

[grave hatch]

That will justify the text within its own layout space.

It won't position the text within its containing slot.

E.g. if you set the MinDesiredWidth of the text to 100 pixels and the text itself was only 30, then justification would do something.

Or you have multiline text that has lines of different length.

[faint oriole]

Anyone have pointers on where to look to create dynamic asset icons (Like how static meshes icons are an image of the mesh itself)

[craggy holly]

Look into AssetTypeActions and Thumbnail Renderers

[faint oriole]

Thanks

[faint oriole]

Does anyone know how to remove this white outline around my widgets, or where they could've come from? I never defined it anywhere. The brushes the brushes here were created by me and I never defined it in those either.

I'm using SCompoundWidget as a base

[grave hatch]

Do you have an SBorder anywhere?

What's the container for your widget?

[faint oriole]

Oh, yeah, lots of SBorders. Is that just built in to SBorder? The container for that particular widget is a list view but it appears outside of the listview too (on other SBorders lol)

[faint oriole]

Should I use SBox instead

It seems that white outline only appears on SBorders which I don't set the brush of. It also appears on my custom STableRow, though, presumably because STableRow inherits SBorder. What should I do about that?

For now I just created a transparent brush in my style set and in my STableRow's construct function I just SetBorderImage() to the transparent brush. That fixes it but feels like its not the intended solution lol.

[craggy holly]

It's probably coming from the default STableRow style

[sleek pumice]

Hi there, I have posted my help request in the UMG room but was wondering if anyone in here had crazy UMG knowledge and could help! If you could help I would be forever in your debt

[faint oriole]

Is it possible to create a toolkit that can be docked to the sidebar?

Or rather, an application with tabs.

not necessarily a requirement of what I'm making but it sure would be nice

[grave hatch]

"in the sidebar" ?

Like the modeling or landscape tools?

[faint oriole]

as in how you can do this to nomad tabs

and it gets tucked away like this

similar to the content drawer

[grave hatch]

I'm not sure that's possible with nomad tabs?

Find out how the floating content browser does it. 🙂

[faint oriole]

Well, that's the thing, the content browser doesn't have tabs either :P So my guess is that it's impossible (or just very nontrivial). But that's okay, I'll live without it

[grave hatch]

Search the source for "dock to sidebar" and find out what that option does.

And find out how the tabs it uses are created, etc.

It's probably not simple lol

[magic forge]

Is anyone using Slate for in-game UI? is there any advantage over UMG?

[grave hatch]

Speed.

I believe Fortnite uses it directly for things that are destroyed and recreated a lot.

[magic forge]

Is it also easier to maintain state? is it like IMGUI?

[grave hatch]

Slate is a mix of design paradigms. It's pretty easy to maintain, sure, but it requires you to recompile your c++ files to change it.

Unlike UMG which you just edit in teh editor.

[magic forge]

Is there any slate tutorial? my worst problem with UMG is sync state between c++ code and gui (two way) and i don`t really liked the new ModelView system

I like how IMGUI works, i hope Slate is the same

IMGUI is imediate mode gui

[grave hatch]

Have you tried using a custom UUserWidget with named slots?

It makes the 2-way communication a lot easier.

You can set up UPROPERTYs in the umg widget class and give them a name, then when you add a widget to your UMG-subclass of that uuserwidget and give it the same name, it is assigned to that UPROPERTY, meaning you can manage it via c++.

And add your own BNE/BIEs, of course.

[magic forge]

Do you think using Dear IMGUI for in-game UI is a bad ideia? looks like a lot of games uses it

Many using UE

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/wiki/Software-using-Dear-ImGui

[grave hatch]

I can't say I've used ImGui, so I don't know.

[grave hatch]

<@&213101288538374145> can we get this pinned, please? It's pretty useful.

[grave hatch]

Thanks!

[faint oriole]

I'm really confused as to what's going on with this SVerticalBox - Both of it's slots are set to VAlign_Top yet for some reason this SSeperator halfway down acts like it's on VAlign_Fill

[grave hatch]

Use the widget debugger and see what's going on!

[faint oriole]

By widget debugger do you mean the reflector?

Because I've been using the reflector and neither widget seems to be claiming any more space than it takes up visually

As can be seen in the image above, the "No asset selected" set of widgets only extends to the bottom of the icon

[grave hatch]

Er, yes, reflector!

What's your code?

[faint oriole]

I put valigns on pretty much everything just to try bruteforce the desired result but, no luck

[grave hatch]

Slate is painful without syntax highlighting lol

[faint oriole]

here, stitched it together in MS paint lol

[grave hatch]

Lol don't worry, I just copied+pasted it into VS 🙂

You do have it set to AutoHeight

Which should be fine for a spacer...

Oh separator...

Hmm

Have you tried adding .AutoHeight() to the separator's slot?

[faint oriole]

That didn't work, but sent me in the right direction. Putting .AutoHeight() on the slot above that one fixed the issue!

Thanks!

And sorry for the late response, I went out lol

[grave hatch]

No worries. Glad it's fixed!

[low bluff]

I wonder where we could pin this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovpiYkYFlPM

Guess Slate and #plugin-dev maybe

Extending the Editor: Making the Most of Unreal Engine's Existing Framework | Unreal Fest 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovpiYkYFlPM

[grave hatch]

Oh that's cool!

I need to watch that at some point.

[faint oriole]

Oh yeah I watched that

it just came out

Great talk

[faint oriole]

Could someone help disamibiguate for me what exactly the uses for SDetailView, IDetailView, ISinglePropertyView, and however many other "Detail/Property view" classes I'm forgetting there are? What's the difference between "Detail" and "Property"? I seem to get them all mixed up right now

[grave hatch]

The I classes are interfaces that are exposed to the public.

The S classes are the actual widgets that are private. You can't use them directly.

A details view is widget showing the properties of an object or set of objects.

The details panel is a tab with a details view.

Essentially a detail is a property I guess?

[stuck jewel]

IDetailsCustomization - how to draw everything within a Details window. the entire window frame
IPropertyCustomization - how to draw a single property row entry within a regular details panel displaying rows of properties

one other common source of confusion - you can have both for some things, i.e. you could implement Details and Property customizations both for UObjects. Opening the properties of that UObject will use the Details code. Adding that UObject as a property of something else (like an Instanced UObject) will use the Properties code.

not immediately what you mentioned but you did say "and other classes"

[faint oriole]

I see - Thanks! That clears stuff up a bit

[placid beacon]

Has anyone dug into this commit? It seems like a bandaid? It looks to force a ton of slow path updating for retainer boxes
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commit/b577bc15598cecb5d662a742423fb6849037654f

{
    if (bEnableRetainedRendering)
    {
        if (NeedsPrepass())
        {
            SetNeedsSlowPath(true);
        }
        ProcessInvalidation();
        if (NeedsSlowPath())
        {
            FChildren* Children = SCompoundWidget::GetChildren();
            Prepass_ChildLoop(LayoutScaleMultiplier, Children);
        }
        return false;
    }
    else
    {
        return true;
    }
}

[faint oriole]

Where should I look if I want to change the size of the snap grid on a custom graph? Is that allowed?

[frigid stirrup]

programmatically or just in general? because you can do that in editor preferences under "grid snap size" in the graph section.

[faint oriole]

Programatically. I see the GetSnapGridSize() function in SNodePanel but think it'd be overkill to subclass snodepanel just to change the snap grid

[faint oriole]

If I have an IPropertyHandle of a struct, how can I get the members of that struct as IPropertyHandles? I've tried GetChildHandle but in the debugger the ChildNodes field is empty

[grave hatch]

Does the struct have UPROPERTYs?

[faint oriole]

Decided to go a different route, old one was roundabout

anyway, a new question!

When it comes to Tab Factories & Tab Spawners, what's the practical difference? Can Spawners registered by a toolkit be used in modes of the toolkit? Additionally, is it possible to register a Factory to a WorkspaceMenuCategory?

[grave hatch]

I think there's just 2 different versions of the same thing. Classic Epic, a new system is added (workflow centric) and they keep the old one.

[faint oriole]

I'm yet to know what the difference between a normal toolkit and a "workflow centric" one is

[grave hatch]

Honestly I've not used a toolkit for anything workflow centric, I've only used them as part of the interactive tools framework.

[faint oriole]

Is it bad that I've not heard of the interactive tools framework

I've been doing everything with toolkits and stuff

unless I have been using itf but just have not heard the term itf

[grave hatch]

You know things like the landscape editor? The modelling tools? Etc. That toolbar over on the left is the ITF.

[faint oriole]

Oh, I see, so is ITF intended for editor modes? Or just any toolbar that resides by the viewport?

[grave hatch]

It works with editor modes, it doesn't have to use them, though.

Like we have a system that uses editor modules without any ITF integration. And we have an ITF mode that uses a couple of different editor modes for various things.

[stuck jewel]

so right now all of my stuff is made with attribute bindings, and there's a lot of it, of course now my graph is turning bloody slow once i have a hundred things in it.

attributes of course must be checking on tick since they update immediately... is there some keywords i can search for to see if i can maybe switch my widgets to instead use arguments, and manually re-Construct() an individual widget upon an external event, instead of relying on attributes' tick monitoring?

like this screenshot would have at least a few thousand bound attribute fields, and i'm guessing if i switch all of these to arguments that didn't keep updating my graph would run much snappier

i also wonder if widgets that are fully Collapse'd still calculate anything...

[stuck jewel]

bleh, maybe that's a red herring i've given myself. switched a few to hardcoded values and it isn't much different. maybe i'm just drawing too much shite 😄

[faint oriole]

When you spawn a tab in a layout (from a tab factory) is there any way to get the content of that tab? As in the widget within.

[grave hatch]

An invalidation root?

Or something like that.

[pallid gyro]

What I do is just declare some SharedPtr member and use SAssignNew instead of SNew where I want to be able to access one of the child widgets or its contents in the future

[faint oriole]

Ended up doing this :D

[fluid jewel]

i have an editor widget i created that displays a custom graph
at points i need to switch the graph instance from one to another.

im having trouble clearning the initial graph, and displaying the second.
i tried iterating through all the nodes in the graph and deleting them manually, but this doesn't seem like the correct workflow
I tried clearing the working graph, along with the graph editor, creating a new instance of SGraphEditor with a new instance, and this just seems to create bugs where the nodes that previously existed in the graph are in some kind of limbo state
i feel as though I'm approaching this wrong

[pallid gyro]

I think you may be missing the distinction between the UEdGraph object and the SGraphEditor widget, the actual graph object should be something you create 'per asset', like some UObject has a graph member, they are linked, you also have the SGraphEditor widget that expects an object derived from UEdGraph to work with, you need to create a new graph editor widget and point it to the new graph, you definitely don't want to remove nodes in the existing graph

unless it's some transient graph or something? though that's probably not the case.

[faint oriole]

Is there a bindable delegate in DetailsViews for when any property is changed?

Actually, I could just use PostEditChangeProperty for this.

[fluid jewel]

Thank you for the clarification, though i may still not be understanding completely.
A runtime representation of the graph is added to the runtime object
this is how I'm creating the graph

void SQuestEditorWidget::CreateQuestGraph(UQuest* Quest) {
    // clear existing graph if it exists
    if (WorkingGraph) {
        WorkingGraph->Nodes.Empty();
        WorkingGraph = nullptr;
    }
    GraphEditor = nullptr;

    // Create a new Quest Graph
    WorkingGraph = NewObject<UEQQuestGraph>(Quest);    
    WorkingGraph->Schema = UEQQuestGraphSchema::StaticClass();

    // ..Commands appearance and events

    // Build Graph
    GraphEditor = SNew(SGraphEditor)
    .AdditionalCommands(CommandsList)
    .IsEditable(true)
    .GraphToEdit(WorkingGraph)
    .GraphEvents(InEvents)
    .Appearance(AppearanceInfo);

    UpdateDetailsView();
}

And the widget is just displaying it like so

            + SSplitter::Slot()
            .Value(0.60f)[
                SAssignNew(GraphEditor, SGraphEditor)
                .AdditionalCommands(CommandsList)
                .IsEditable(true)
                .GraphToEdit(WorkingGraph)
            ]

[tardy steeple]

Has anyone tried setting icons for user widgets? Been trying to add icons onto user widgets so they can be easier to find in the UI. I've tried the following but it seems to not do anything.

// Get the slate widget
TSharedPtr<SWidget> SlateWidget = Widget->TakeWidget();
TSharedPtr<SDockTab> Tab = StaticCastSharedPtr<SDockTab>(SlateWidget);

if (Tab.IsValid())
{
    const FSlateBrush* Brush = FMyStyleSet::Get()->GetBrush(SlateIcon);
    Tab->SetTabIcon(Brush);
}

[frigid stirrup]

in umg you set the widget icons in the class settings under thumbnail settings. not sure if that helps.

[tardy steeple]

That only sets the classes thumbnail. What I'm wanting to set is a tab icon for a UMG based widget in the editor, the thumbnail does not do this

[pallid gyro]

I think calling SNew and SAssignNew on the same member here can cause undesired results, you should only SAssignNew to the member ptr once and then add it to the hierarchy, when you want to edit different graphs you probably just want to remove the existing graph from the hiearchy and SAssignNew again (to this purpose you may want to store a pointer to the panel widget that contains the graph editor and just call Clear Children on it).

The way you have things set up depending on the order where things are called your GraphEditor pointer may just be pointing at a widget that is not in the hierarchy (you're creating a new object two times, but only one of them is added to a slot)

[pallid gyro]

I dunno why it doesn't work with SetTabIcon but if you just use SetIcon when you register the TabSpawner is works -

[pallid gyro]

Anyone knows what controls the 'which tabs get to dock where' behavior? like, a sequencer tab cannot be docked in a 'standalone asset tab', and tabs from standalone assets can't just be attached wherever, it seems like there are some different categories of tabs, is this the 'workgroup' thingie you declare in the tab spawner?

[pallid gyro]

Well, turns out that's really simple just

[tribal bolt]

Tangential to your solved issue,

Do you know if there is a function to control the tabs “hide” behaviour, so you can hide the tab name and shows a small blue triangle

[pallid gyro]

I tried to figure it out (also next time, an in-editor example of the behavior you're trying to figure out can be helpful), I think you're talking about the way the tabs get hidden in say the control rig editor, but I couldn't find the exact setting, it seems like the control rig editor uses the old style tab factory method which I can't quite figure out. I'll give it another look tomorrow. If you have a few more in-editor examples to look at it might be helpful as they might have a TabSpawner based implementation that's easier to read.

[faint oriole]

I don't know how to do that in code but if you right click a tab and press "hide tab" it does that

[light dragon]

I'm trying my hardest to create a 2D viewport that houses a widget and I am having a nasty linker error but i believe i have the module included can anybody help?

TSharedRef<SWidget> NerveDialogueViewportTabFactory::CreateTabBody(const FWorkflowTabSpawnInfo& Info) const
{
    const TSharedPtr<NerveDialogueEditorToolkit> Tool = ViewportToolKit.Pin();

    const TSharedPtr<SVerticalBox> DialogueUserWidget = SNew(SVerticalBox);
    Tool->SetCurrentWorkingDialogueScreenViewport(DialogueUserWidget);

    return SNew(SNerveDialogueViewport, Tool);
}

module list

[stuck jewel]

this isn't something to do with modules, forget about that. it's something about your code but i've only bumped into this once and no recollection. simplify your code down so it's only about a single one (SRuler? looks easiest to fix first?) and always post the full build output, not a snippet

on that note, SRuler is private...

SZoomPan should work though

[light dragon]

Tried simplifying and it did not work

[stuck jewel]

if you comment all that crud out and just put TSharedRef<SWidget> ASDF = SNew(SZoomPan); somewhere does that build? it should

is SZoomPan (also) private in 5.1?

[light dragon]

yep 🥲. this is nonsense

[stuck jewel]

https://tenor.com/view/seinfeld-kramer-thumbs-up-gif-15451120498744112839

[light dragon]

is it publick in newer version? i want to update but if its not public then no reason to

[stuck jewel]

szoompan is
sruler is still private

[light dragon]

well i can live with that

[stuck jewel]

no fknig idea what bozos at epic think when they make this stuff and decide to forcefully make it impossible for people like us to use it

[light dragon]

ill just copy the exact same code the engine uses and make it public

[light dragon]

they already fired the intern

[stuck jewel]

pretty much... wonderful duplicated code go brrrr

[light dragon]

Well i copied everything i don't get errors regarding ruler and zoom pan but I still get error for the blueprint util library

0>Module.LazyNerveDialogueEditor.cpp.obj: Error LNK2019 : unresolved external symbol "public: static struct TTuple<struct UE::Math::TVector2<double>,struct UE::Math::TVector2<double> > __cdecl FWidgetBlueprintEditorUtils::GetWidgetPreviewAreaAndSize(class UUserWidget *,struct UE::Math::TVector2<double>,struct UE::Math::TVector2<double>,enum EDesignPreviewSizeMode,struct TOptional<struct UE::Math::TVector2<double> >)" (?GetWidgetPreviewAreaAndSize@FWidgetBlueprintEditorUtils@@SA?AU?$TTuple@U?$TVector2@N@Math@UE@@U123@@@PEAVUUserWidget@@U?$TVector2@N@Math@UE@@1W4EDesignPreviewSizeMode@@U?$TOptional@U?$TVector2@N@Math@UE@@@@@Z) referenced in function "protected: struct FOptionalSize __cdecl SNerveDialogueViewport::GetPreviewAreaHeight(void)const " (?GetPreviewAreaHeight@SNerveDialogueViewport@@IEBA?AUFOptionalSize@@XZ)
0>Module.LazyNerveDialogueEditor.cpp.obj: Error LNK2019 : unresolved external symbol "public: static float __cdecl FWidgetBlueprintEditorUtils::GetWidgetPreviewDPIScale(class UUserWidget *,struct UE::Math::TVector2<double>)" (?GetWidgetPreviewDPIScale@FWidgetBlueprintEditorUtils@@SAMPEAVUUserWidget@@U?$TVector2@N@Math@UE@@@Z) referenced in function "protected: float __cdecl SNerveDialogueViewport::GetPreviewDPIScale(void)const " (?GetPreviewDPIScale@SNerveDialogueViewport@@IEBAMXZ)
0>UnrealEditor-LazyNerveDialogueEditor.dll: Error LNK1120 : 2 unresolved externals

[pallid gyro]

Do you declare dependency on the "UMGEditor" module?

[stuck jewel]

is it exported?

[light dragon]

yep did that

[stuck jewel]

class UMGEDITOR_API FWidgetBlueprintEditorUtils
just upgrade to 5.4 already lol

[light dragon]

yea its public

[light dragon]

so much problems, ill start downloading it now

[stuck jewel]

It's not exported in 5.1

[light dragon]

Well no more pain for me after this installs (cross fingers)

[stuck jewel]

Iirc around 5.1 there was a big push to make a bunch of stuff private and/or non-exported to reduce engine compile times. And then they've been back tracking on some of it since. Might be what happened 🙄

[light dragon]

lets hope they dont change their mind in the future

[grave hatch]

If it's public they have to maintain a consistent api and stuff. Private bt default saves them work.

Also if its private, just copy and paste the entire class. That'll work fine for SRuler.

[stuck jewel]

ehh... that's only because managers suck at being chads and making executive decisions. break the damn API, make it better, make people adapt to it. it's not like this API is responsible for fort knox's gold vault security. lol

(not to mention they do change public crap all the time, both for better and worse )

[stuck jewel]

using Flow Graph. I have an annoyingly complex graph node widget which takes like 15 ms to Construct()... and with the way graphs work, any time you add a new node or change pins it has to reconstruct the entire graph... so after I get 100 nodes in the graph, this means a 1.5 second wait for almost every user click.

the annoying thing is that usually 90% of it is hidden and doesn't even really need to be Construct()ed most of the time. I wonder if i'm missing some obvious strategy here. I guess usually you're relying on the Details panel to display data about what is selected, but I was really enjoying having it all on the graph easy to edit.

my current idea is to make a global toggle that permanently hides all of the expensive advanced widgetry, so you can at least go about your business easy most of the time and then turn on the advanced junk to finish up. but that's just such a shit workflow

or approach number 2 is give up, build a pretty details customization instead and leave the graph nodes simple and uggers

talking to myself, approach 2 might not be too bad if i just have simple/cheap labels on the nodes that show what data they have set (i hate big graph representations of what is mostly just data, where it isn't possible to easily see everything about everything without clicking into each node)

[pallid gyro]

I think it should just be possible to override the OnNodeUpdated method somewhere in the hierarchy and make it a little more selective, I am not sure how Flow exactly operates, I looked at it a bit but never used it; if the nodes inherit from UEdGraphNode (and I'm pretty sure that they do) you should be able to override what happens when it's updated, and possibly inject your own SNodePanel if you need to get really specific with how things get painted.

[grave hatch]

That's what you get told if you aren't one of the special people, though.

[stuck jewel]

https://tenor.com/view/sad-gif-18140748

[stuck jewel]

going to see if i can discover anything useful on these leads this week, thanks!

[hexed jungle]

The plugin i use had me do it manually, never really checked how/what caused it but

[stuck jewel]

Yeah I think I'm just going to throw in the towel and switch to cheap "display" info text in the graph and keep the expensive setup widgets in the details pane lol

[magic forge]

Hey guys, how do slate works? is polling for changes the right way of using Slate?

[vast scarab]

What are the requirements for a slate widget to be drawn on the UMG editor?
I have a Slate widget that is wrapped with a UWidget and placed inside a userwidget but for some reason it is invisible in the UMG editor, it works just fine in-game.

BEGIN_SLATE_FUNCTION_BUILD_OPTIMIZATION
void Splayer_hud::Construct(const FArguments& in_args) {
  w_consumable = in_args._w_consumable;
  if(!w_consumable.IsValid()) return;
  anim_fade = FCurveSequence();
  const float fade_duration = 0.25f;
  curve_fade = anim_fade.AddCurve(0.0f, fade_duration, ECurveEaseFunction::QuadInOut);
  // clang-format off
  ChildSlot
  [
    SAssignNew(hud_canvas, SConstraintCanvas)
    + SConstraintCanvas::Slot()
    .Anchors(FAnchors(0.91f, 0.86f, 0.96f, 0.93f))
    .Alignment(FVector2D(1.0f, 1.0f))
    .Offset(-12.0f)
    .ZOrder(0)
    [
      SNew(SScaleBox)
      .Stretch(EStretch::ScaleToFit)
      .StretchDirection(EStretchDirection::Both)
      [
        SNew(SBox)
        .WidthOverride(188.f)
        .HeightOverride(250.f)
        [
          SAssignNew(img_consumable, SImage)
          .Image(w_consumable->get_consumable_brush())
        ]
      ]
    ]
  ];
  // clang-format on
  hud_canvas->SetVisibility(EVisibility::HitTestInvisible);
  upd_consumable_hud(false);
}
END_SLATE_FUNCTION_BUILD_OPTIMIZATION

[pallid gyro]

I don't think you need to do anything for a widget to be visible in the UMG designer, it will work by default, I suspect that your visibility related logic is triggered by something external to the widget and that doesn't happen when you spawn it in the editor?

[vast scarab]

Oh, I'm an idiot, you were right, the visibility condition was written on the SCompoundWidget's tick.
For some reason I thought it would never get evaluated outside of runtime (which as I'm writting this I realize it doesn't make any sense since the entire editor runs of Slate.)

void Splayer_hud::Tick(const FGeometry& alloted_geometry, const double in_current_time,
    const float in_delta_time) {
  SCompoundWidget::Tick(alloted_geometry, in_current_time, in_delta_time);
  float new_render_opacity = 1;
  // if(hud_canvas) { new_render_opacity = get_anim_fade_value(); }
  hud_canvas->SetRenderOpacity(new_render_opacity);
}

[tawny timber]

How does slate Render Transform work? I'm using Slate to draw some text labels for a space map using unprojected render target positions. If I add an STextBlock to my overlay, and set .RenderTransform using actual screen positions, it's wrong.

Basically transforming the X position of my SText 1200 places it all the way to the right side of the parent widget, no matter if the viewport is tiny or huge.

The actual screen x value here is way way larger than 1200

[grave hatch]

Are you sure that's not an alignment issue?

[tawny timber]

Yeah I figured it out, I just took my unprojected position and divided it by the FGeometry.Scale, and it seems to work now

It is strange how added STextBlock is sized however:

That's me inspecting the STextBlock I've created, seems to translate fine, but is inheriting the full width/height of the parent overlay

[grave hatch]

Enclose it in a size box.

[tawny timber]

TextOverlay->AddSlot() [
        SNew(STextBlock)
        .TextStyle(FDefaultStyle::Get(), "MapSystemTextStyle")
        .Text(Star->GetName())
        .RenderTransform(FSlateRenderTransform( FScale2D(1.f, 1.f), TransformedScreenLocation))
      ];

[grave hatch]

Or an SBox if you're slate.

Or set the slot's alignment to Left/Right/Top/Bottom.

(not fill)

[tawny timber]

How do I do that? Just do .HAlign on the AddSlot()?

[grave hatch]

Ya

[tawny timber]

Thanks, that works, now I have to mess with my TransformedScreenLocation math as well.

If I do TextOverlay->AddSlot().HAlign(HAlign_Center).VAlign(VAlign_Center), and set the render transform to 0,0, it's centered, but off the top left of the text block

[grave hatch]

Yeah. If you want it centred, you'd need a full screen widget with the text centre aligned.

Or run the prepass and set the text's render offset to half the widget's size.

[faint oriole]

Is there some sort of "on pin connected" delegate for UEdGraphs?

[pallid gyro]

You can override the connection change method

[fluid jewel]

I have a custom asset that opens a custom editor with a UEdGraph
The graph basically acts as a builder tool for my asset

I'm tying to find the right hook to actually build the asset from the graph
similar to the "Compile" button on BPs or how it will compile the BP graph when saving / entering pie, etc

Anyone have any ideas? thanks

[grave hatch]

Do you just want it to "compile" the asset when you hit save in the custom editor?

Just set up a save button and bind the action (probably in FGenericCommands or whatever it is) to your compile+save code.

Your asset editor probably already has a TSharedRef/Ptr<FUICommandList> you can use to bind the commands. If not, add one and process the key events to trigger it.

[fluid jewel]

yeah I'm trying to avoid a phyisical button, and for it to be able to just "compile" when i save the asset, or when i enter play mode

[grave hatch]

People like buttons.

Ask yourself - how do you save the asset?

I'm not pushing for a button, it's a serious question.

[stuck jewel]

to add to that, i also like compiling without saving. i use it all the time.

[grave hatch]

Which should be another button. And another keybind in the editor.

[fluid jewel]

apologies, let me rephrase I'm not against having a button. in fact i have one for testing and it works great
but what i want is for it to auto compile when i ctrl + s or ctrl +shift +s
as well as for the "compilation" to occur when i enter play mode.

I've tried just tying into when the graph has been modified, but that leads to several issues. seems that the creation of nodes is an async task, so not all the properties are set the same frame that the node is created.
so i was hoping i could instead just compile when i manually save the asset

[frigid stirrup]

its super common in other platforms to have post save hooks to perform other actions. I think though if all you want is for it to auto compile when you save in your ide you can do that using the ide. Both Clion and vscode let you "auto compile" as a feature of saving.

I think though you'd need to override the save functionality in UE to get it working in code via serialization : https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/how-to-serialize-additional-data-with-an-asset/611423/3

you could just call a command line util to compile your project as an alternative.

command line documentation on building is here https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/build-operations-cook-package-deploy-and-run?application_version=4.27

so serialize to hook into file save -> system("UE compile CLI command string") to compile.

[fluid jewel]

sorry that's not quite right
basically i have an asset. when you open the asset in unreal it opens a custom graph
the graph isn't a typical execution graph. it instead functions as a visual flowchart/factory. when i press the "save/compile" button in the editor it builds the asset. that's what i mean by "compiling"

im just trying to streamline that building process
so that whenever the asset is saved it first builds the asset from the graph

[grave hatch]

How does your save button work?

[fluid jewel]

It just runs through all the modes starting at the root node, and builds the asset. The graph is basically a flow chart representation. And when I build it stores the serialized data on the asset itself.

[grave hatch]

No, that's how the save works. I'm asking how the button works.

[fluid jewel]

not sure i follow then.
button is a standard SButton and all it does is call my custom build function that serializes the data, stores it to the asset, and then calls Modify() on the asset. it's basically a compile and save button put together

[grave hatch]

So it doesn't tap into the save command?

[pallid gyro]

I think the k2 schema and some graphs derived from it have some entry points for classes derived from FCompilerContext or something like that, some 3rd party plugins also use it (I think Flow does but I'm not 100% on that) but it was hard for me to wrap my head around, in my custom asset changes happen in real time but there is also a custom init entry point that builds the asset for in game usage (the asset is a metasound dynamically edited using the metasound builder subsystem), if you want to have something like that happen automatically you can override the UObject's post save method -

There are several editor graph schemas that use some form of compiler context, plenty of examples, I'm not sure if it's even that complicated I just didn't feel like investigating that whole thing, the blueprint compiler itself is pretty daunting to even look at.

[cinder nimbus]

I have made my first widget using slate rather than umg components, painting me this nice image. Everyone knowing a bit about maps and rooms can see, what i did do. What i would want to do next is press on the lines and change their color from green to red and vice versa.
But i am stuck on a good tutorial, entrance or sth. to the topic in complete, and can't really see, how i would use my mouse input in this scenario.
Anybody in here, who could guide me a bit to where i can find out how to do that ?

[grave hatch]

Are the lines individual widgets? Or are you drawing the lines manually through the paint method?

If they're individual widgets, it's extemely easy.

If you're painting them manually, you'll have to do some math to work out whether your mouse is over the lines or not.

[cinder nimbus]

                FSlateDrawElement::MakeBox(
                    OutDrawElements,
                    LayerId,
                    AllottedGeometry.ToPaintGeometry(FVector2D(TileLength, TileHeight), FSlateLayoutTransform(FVector2D((i + 1) * StepSize, (j + 1) * StepSize))),
                    &Brush,
                    ESlateDrawEffect::None,
                    Color);

Just a paint job
And yes, i can do some math for it, that's ok, but i don't know yet on how to identify my event anyway

[grave hatch]

I would use the on mouse move event to switch cursors between default and the pointy finger one.

Then use on mouse down to trigger interactions.

They're methods you override in your widget.

[cinder nimbus]

i know them from UMG ^^

[grave hatch]

And of course you want some kind of algorithm that can be reused to tell you which line you are hovering, if any.

An algorithm that does not check the hitboxes of each line. 🙂

[cinder nimbus]

It's a small editor, so even that wouldn't be that bad ... but i know what you mean.

[grave hatch]

It's really simple to detect which line you're over.

[cinder nimbus]

i believe that ! ^^

[grave hatch]

I mean, really simple and efficient.

You can do the first step by simply diving the mouse offset from teh top-left by the size of the quad and flooring it.

Then you take the remainder (the non-floor part) and check if it's in the given line sections.

You can probably ignore the intersections as you won't be 100% which line they refer to.

[cinder nimbus]

first, i need to get my click tell me, we can try to do that ^^
i'll dive more into google, showing me more about slate ... unluckily i don't have the entrance to it, yet ...

[grave hatch]

All the information you need should be in the FGeometry and FPointerEvent variables on the mouse move/down events.

[cinder nimbus]

Oh ! Maybe i better Review UButton and SButton then ... They should do that, too.

[grave hatch]

SButton definitely will.

Just don't forget that if you have a 4x4 quad grid that you have 5 possible lines each axis. And the last quad won't have an r-shape, it'll just be a single side.

[cinder nimbus]

it's adjusted and defined by rest of the editor. i have control about that

[grave hatch]

Neat.

[cinder nimbus]

Simple... I want to click it to adjust my output

Until here i added the definition of what is red and green inside one of those assets ^^

[cinder nimbus]

Wohoo. Quite a bunch of lines, but easy to prune

Now 2nd part ^^

[faint oriole]

How does the anim state machine graph go about creating one-way connections between two output pins?

[vernal moth]

I have this SListview and I am trying to set the item that its viewing by default to the last item, I see this and am investigating but I thought i'd ask here quickly if someone knew

    /** When not null, the list will try to scroll to this item on tick. */
    NullableItemType ItemToScrollIntoView;

// I also see this, it gets deeper

    /**
     * Navigate to a specific item, scrolling it into view if needed. If the item is not found, fails silently.
     *
     * @param Item The item to navigate to on the next tick.
     */
    void RequestNavigateToItem(ItemType Item, const uint32 UserIndex = 0)
    {
        TOptional<ItemType> FirstValidItem = Private_FindNextSelectableOrNavigable(Item);
        if (FirstValidItem.IsSet())
        {
            Private_RequestNavigateToItem(FirstValidItem.GetValue(), UserIndex);
        }
    }

The thing is I dont know how to use it lmaooo

                 SNew(SListView<TSharedPtr<FOutputData>>)
                 .Req

Oh I see, I think I need to store the SListview in a pointer list right? (I'm being lazy)

I'm super new to slate and working a nomad tab

[kindred nova]

you can use SAssignNew(variable, type) will do var = new type inside

you can try find things in SB plugin, it is smaller codebase than engine

[vernal moth]

I wanna read about it in that UMG/Slate thing but its a lot. (I will do, I do use your plugin 🐐 )

[kindred nova]

RequestNavigateToItem is a request, not the selected item.
engine has plenty of samples if you text search
sry gonna rush for the bus, will answer tomorrow if you still have questions

[faint oriole]

Oh, apparently the connection between the two pins is actually a node. Delightfully hacky!

[vernal moth]

I should be okay, thanks heaps

[cinder nimbus]

I now can click and get a point as screen position.
How would i translate that to my geoemtries coordinate space ?

[grave hatch]

Use the FGeometry object.

It has an absolute to local function

[cinder nimbus]

it's really not too difficult, even though a lot of scripting happened, that i wouldn't have done myself just like that if i couldn't lent from SButton and UButton, but it looks like it works.
Thanks a lot !

[grave hatch]

Np

[cinder nimbus]

It did work out. And as you said, really easy. Just calculated the if it is inside the tiles area, then broke it down to one tile, checked against a coordinate of a tile and away we are. and in between i got the values, which tile was hit.
now translate that back to my object, but i already published it to my editor via events.
very very nice...

[grave hatch]

🙂

Nice!

[toxic badger]

Hey guys, I'm trying to implement Drag and Drop functionallity and wanted to implement it in C++. I already have a setup for the draggable component (even though there is an issue on the first time dragging it) but I need a drop target, which I wanted to implement in C++ for consistency. Now the issue is I was trying to set the WidgetTree Root to a CanvasPanel in the NativeConstruct of the UserWidget, but it appears to not work. So I wonder, should I use slate, because I'm not finding any examples, that set the WidgetTree in c++ and most of the C++ examples are just in slate.

[pallid gyro]

Editor classes all use an SDropTarget widget usually placed on an SOverlay on top of the other widgets in the hierarchy, there's no UWidget with this functionality in the engine, I know there's a UMG alternative for drag and drop I have no idea if it's CPP exposed or how it operates but either way SDropTarget is a public widget and you can wrap it with your own UWidget (can throw in the overlay as well).

The SDropTarget already has delegates you can bind to, you don't need to do much slating. If you're in CPP you can of course also just add it to the widget hierarchy with a bit of slate.

[toxic badger]

There is a NativeOnDrop function, but I suspect, that constructing the widget tree like this does not work

because I'm also not seeing the button

But I'm wondering, what happens normally in games, would drag and drop functionallity be done complete with blueprints, because there are almost no source online, or would most of the c++ stuf be done with slate instead of umg?

[pallid gyro]

When you open up the slate page on the epic site it says "hey if you're making a game use UMG" and UMG is designed to work with the BP designer, so I think that generally yeah they expect people to use the UMG/BP accessible systems for in-game usage.

[toxic badger]

and slate is mostly to just implement new elements right?

i was just thinking it might be a good idea, to have a base class setup in c++ which implements the drag and drop functinallity, but maybe I'm sticking with pure bp then

[pallid gyro]

in my opinion slate really isn't that scary and the fact that it can easily be extended with BP/UMG really doesn't make it an alternative to UMG but rather like, a way to quickly create the underlying 'data/viewmodel' and the widget's layout

[toxic badger]

But for things like, being able to move around UI components, or being able to drag and drop around abilites, you would implement this purely in BP?
(Except for data definitions and managin the abilites)

[pallid gyro]

Personally? all slate.

[toxic badger]

really?

UMG is just built on top of slate right?

[pallid gyro]

Yeah

[toxic badger]

and slate is doen mostly in c++ right?

[pallid gyro]

You can create a base widget in slate and expose panels and stuff to which UMG widgets can be easily added in the designer, you can expose attributes/arguments from slate so that they're configurable in the UMG designer

It kinda depends on whether you're working with a team that has UI designers and whether you can give them the 'scaffolding' they'll need to do their job, doing things in slate can potentially also leave you with a widget that restricts UI designers down the line too much and slows things down

[toxic badger]

Thats not an issue in my case

[pallid gyro]

That's why I personally prefer to go all slate all the way, I just like it, and it's fun to play with c++, and like making a pianoroll in BP felt really silly to me

today I know how to draw a piano in a single for loop with 4 lines of code, makes me happy I guess.

(not really 4, but not far off)

[toxic badger]

I just want to have a clean setup and also being able to maybe tie this to things like abilities, I was watching a basic tutorial on drag and drop with blueprints and it seemed so verbose already and thinking about then reusing it I think this is a path i won't go so I wanted to go C++.

[toxic badger]

yea exactly thats what I like, it's doable in BP but it can get messy for things.

I guess I'm realizing to late that UMG is mostly for BP and that I should use Slate for the C++ parts. But what I'm gathering from your comments is, that it's worth learning about slate right? 🙂

[pallid gyro]

Yeah, I think so.

[toxic badger]

TBH in the beginning I tought that slate was the predecessor to UMG, and it might be outdated at some point 😅

[pallid gyro]

The syntax is just a bit strange and if you're not comfortable with lambdas well you're gonna be comfortable with them real soon. co-pilot helps a bunch imo.

Epic kinda want it to appear like UMG is the newer shinier toy while really it's just BP exposure for slate, which is way more powerful

[toxic badger]

Yea I mean i totaly get that UMG part especially for designers and also for me personally, setting up a UI in pure C++ does not feel nice instead of having an editor where you see everything, but for certain things yea ... 😅

[pallid gyro]

I mean it's not "just" BP exposure, it's also a visual designer which is not a trivial thing at all.

[toxic badger]

But everything has slate underlying right?

[pallid gyro]

google about the BindWidget UPROPERTY, it's actually fun to play around with, creating low level scaffolding with slate etc

every widget is a slate widget yes

[toxic badger]

Yea when i started trying to figure out how to get UMG working with C++ thats what I foudn first, this completely messed me up, until I understood that it's just creating the Widget in the editor and then being able to bind to it.

Now I'm wondering what some good resources for getting startet with slate are, but I'll probably watch that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3oIfI7nBM ^^

[pallid gyro]

Yes Ben is a legend.

[toxic badger]

and also before i forget it, thanks a lot you gave me really good and needed advice 🙂

[toxic badger]

I was just skimming through it a few hours ago before I needed a break and still some of the parts are stuck in my head ^^

[pallid gyro]

I think he has one called "How I stopped being scared of slate" or something, it's nice, honestly I think like once you get even a tiny bit comfortable you should dive in to the editor code and look at the many examples you can find there (like if there's some widget that does a thing, go find its code), Ben's materials and many of the slate tutorials focus a lot about like 'making new classes' with slate where half the power of slate comes from being able to create complex widgets in-place with lambdas and other tricks, you see that in the editor all the time, but definitely Ben's tutorials are a great resource

There are also a few basic examples on Epic's website

[toxic badger]

Yea thats examctly that one ^^

I was trying to set this up with UMG a few hours ago until I gave up and needed a break, I'm so glad to have this other perspective now and didn't continue to try getting UMG work from C++, because as far as I understand now, it does not make too much sense. Maybe for binding a widget and then do some basic stuff with C++. But it also appears so hard if not impossible to just build a widget tree in c++. At least I didn't find any resources online (that worked) and couldn't get it to work.

So slate gives me new hope now, to be able to do the things in C++ 😄

[pallid gyro]

It's funny but many of the common topics in the UMG channel and in the unreal forums require really convuloted UMG solutions but can be solved in 2 lines of code in slate

Like setting an enum combo box

[toxic badger]

Yea thats exactly what I was thinking!

[pallid gyro]

also the unreal forums are not great for slate topics, I ran into many confusing answers there

[toxic badger]

Yea I guess it might be more of a "coding" thing then

But I hope, that as long as you get down the basics, it's then most of the time just looking at the documentation or just figure out what functionallity to use.

[pallid gyro]

Uhm I mean, what documentation.

[toxic badger]

😅😅

[pallid gyro]

it's just the editor source code (and 3rd party plugins, which help a lot as they're often written by people who try to figure out the system)

[toxic badger]

Thats more documentation than you get in some cases 😅😅

Yea but it's crazy to me, if you compare the documentation of unreal engine things with things like from google/facebook or maybe even a half decent open source project its crazy if you think about what a huge company is behind it

I wonder if they have better internal documentation but I guess not otherwise it would be public

[pallid gyro]

I doubt they have anything, it doesn't look like they sanitize their code for comments or anything like that it's just generally not documented.

[toxic badger]

Yea I think the same 😅

But yea also might be a little bit of a different focuse in comparison to something like android and maybe a company culture thing

[cinder nimbus]

With Save Option, my first editor script is working quite well !

[grave hatch]

Neat.

[toxic badger]

Hey guys, I'm trying to move a widget on mouse move like this. But the further I move the mouse the bigger the offset between the widget and the cursor becomes. What Could that be?

[grave hatch]

You're using the delta twice.

I would assume.

Store the original position of the mouse when you start dragging.

Compare it against the current position.

Use that as yoru render transform.

Mouse delta is also very unreliable as moving the mouse really fast fucks it up.

Hence using hard reference points.

[toxic badger]

Yea it's a sample I found, but the widget is behind the mouse

I tried it bevore with the difference but maybe I'll try that again

but using SetRenderTransform is a okayish way of doing it right?

[grave hatch]

Not... really?

If the container has clipping, for instance, moving it beyond the bounds of the container will cause it to disappear.

[toxic badger]

But if it's a child of a SConstrainedCanvas, could I set the position from within the child?

What would you recommend for that?

[grave hatch]

You could use the widget's slot in the canvas to move it.

[toxic badger]

But how could I know which solut is currently dragged?

[grave hatch]

Shrug

[toxic badger]

and something is still of, I now set the position of the widget to the mouse position and the more i move to the bottom right the more the cursor wanders out of the initial position

and it's also not dpi scalign i already checkt if it differs from 1

[grave hatch]

The render transform is the offset from its start position, not its absolute position.

[toxic badger]

yea but it has got to be different units for the transform in comparison to the mouse position

otherwise i would nod expect the cursor be in the middle of the widget on the left and the more to the right i drag it the cursor is outside on the right side of the widget

red point is the cursor

and its consistent i can move it forward and back and it will stay the same

[grave hatch]

There are local to absolute and absolute to local position functions.

You probably want to use them.

[toxic badger]

FVector2d CurrentPosition = MouseEvent.GetScreenSpacePosition();
SetRenderTransform(FSlateRenderTransform(CurrentPosition));

[grave hatch]

Yeah that's not correct at all.

[toxic badger]

FVector2d CurrentPosition = MyGeometry.AbsoluteToLocal(MouseEvent.GetScreenSpacePosition()); Would that be better?

[grave hatch]

No

You need to work out the mouse offset from when you started dragging.

Using "whatever teh value are now" is not correct.

[toxic badger]

yea but if i set it to that position i would expect the widget just being moved toward the mouse position dependent on the pivot

But now I'm getting even weirder results

I dont undestand it

[pallid gyro]

I haven't read all the thread but the mouse delta is always the delta from the last from, when you look at all the drag operations in the editor it always works the way Daekesh is telling you to do it, you store the relevant position when you start dragging and you calculate the delta between this position and wherever the mouse is until the mouse up event

[toxic badger]

and what about AbsoluteToLocal and vice versa?

So then I would do that in Mouse down:
InitialPosition = MouseEvent.GetScreenSpacePosition();

and that in the mouse move:
FVector2d CurrentPosition = MouseEvent.GetScreenSpacePosition() - InitialPosition;

But I'm still having the usse of the offset

hmm :/

[grave hatch]

You need to convert screen space into local space.

Easiest way to do that is position * local size / absolute size

I'm sure there's a method on the geometry too that does it the "proper" way.

Is there not a "get local position" for the mouse?

[toxic badger]

Sadly not

When I try to convert it to do it with AbsoluteToLocal it gets even worse 😦

Thats what I dont understand how can this be so hard and so completely off

[pallid gyro]

PositionOffset is just a vector I use because my widget is a panel you can pan/zoom in, can ignore that

[toxic badger]

OK I'll try that

Still doesn't work

[pallid gyro]

we're never gonna know why your code doesn't work, we don't know what you did differently, looking at examples and figuring out the differences is part of the process

[toxic badger]

This is the complete widget code

and this is how i add it to the viewport

[grave hatch]

Why are you still doing this?

[pallid gyro]

Well, for starters, it's really not the render transform you should be setting, it's the position of the slot on the canvas, so I'm not sure

yeah

[grave hatch]

Render transform should be Current - Initial

And what you really should be doing is exposing the slot and setting it via that.

Not using a render transform.

[toxic badger]

So RenderTransform and Offset are two different units?

[grave hatch]

Yes...

[toxic badger]

Ok then I'll refactor it

[pallid gyro]

Find a widget that does the thing you want to do.

[toxic badger]

I was trying to, but is there one that allows you to freely position widgets on the screen?

drag them around?

[pallid gyro]

SGraphNode and SNodePanel do that

but it might be a little hard to parse

it's really just adding the mouse delta to the root position of whatever you were grabbing in the 'space' of the owner widget

you're not far off, just need to keep trying the different options.

[toxic badger]

Yea, I mean I'm new to slate, and what ever, but it's crazy, how hard such a "simple" thing is.

[grave hatch]

It's really not hard, you just have your logic wrong.

[toxic badger]

Also the fact that the widgets needs to be in aparent so it will size to it's content.

[grave hatch]

And we've told you how to fix it like 10 times.

But you still do this:

[toxic badger]

Yea because it seemed like a suggestion not a this is this is the issue when you mentioned it first, and it's crazy, that i have to couple the children and parent so thightly to just position a widget.

[grave hatch]

Record the starting position of the widget.

Record the starting position of the mouse.

Get the current offset of the mouse from the starting position and add it to the starting position of the widget.

[toxic badger]

Yea but this does not change anythign regarding the different unit spaces.

[grave hatch]

Set the widget's location to that value.

You aren't doing any of those things.

[toxic badger]

The widget/mouse position subtraction is a absolute thing, then the mouse should have an offset of n units but the offset should not change when moving the mouse

[grave hatch]

Okay, so 1 of them.

[toxic badger]

And this gives even worse results

[grave hatch]

If you convert the mouse position to local (which you are already doing in that screenshot), it should be fine.

But you can't do just one of the things. You need to do all four of them.

[toxic badger]

And it is not

[grave hatch]

This is not a Slate issue.

[toxic badger]

I just don't understand the different unti spacing how can moving the mouse 100px to the right move the widget only 70px to the right

but as far as i understand its because I'm using RenderTransform instead of the offset

[grave hatch]

They are both in the same unit space.

[toxic badger]

Then why is this happening

then I don't need to refactor it and make it more complicated when there is adifferent thing

[grave hatch]

Because you are doing only one of the four things you need to do.

It's a simple logic problem and you have the wrong logic.

[toxic badger]

I should try this?

[grave hatch]

Yes. In local space.

Don't forget point #4.

[toxic badger]

and that is?

[grave hatch]

This works perfectly well. I've literally written widgets that do this.

It's the next line I said.

After what you just copied+pasted.

[toxic badger]

Okok set the widget position

so can i do it for testing prurposes with the RenderTransform or do i need to set it with the canvas offset ?

[grave hatch]

You can probably use render transform.

It should be the same.

As in, adding 10 to the offset will do the same thing as adding 10 to the render transform.

But they are not the same value.

[toxic badger]

Yea I probably would refactor it later on

Is that what you where saying?

[grave hatch]

You should probalby save the initial render transform as that's what you're changing to move it.

But, yes, that logic seems more sound.

[grave hatch]

Here.

[toxic badger]

Ok, because the problem still persists, because I'm just subtracting a static value 😦

[grave hatch]

You shouldn't be.

[toxic badger]

besides that I'm getting flickering now

[grave hatch]

Did you do the fix I just suggested?

[toxic badger]

StartMousePosition + FVector2d(StartWidgetPosition) is a static value that wont change

[grave hatch]

Because it's still wrong.

It changes based on where you started dragging from...

[pallid gyro]

BTW Daekesh, if I may seek your wisdom myself for a bit, as I was playing around with the sequencer I tried to bind to the OnKeyAdded/Deleted/Moved delegates of FMovieSceneInteger channel and it just didn't work, after snooping around for a bit I realized that this was because on the construction of the TMovieSceneData<> type for all the primitive movie channels "this" wasn't passed as the 'OwningChannel' parameter, after modifying the engine code and adding it I confirmed that the delegates now work, am I missing something or is this an obvious bug (or more likely, the delegate was added and no one ever fixed the older MovieSceneChannels as this functionality was added for the MovieSceneRigSpaceChannel class)? I made a pull request, I just kinda wonder if I was missing something silly.

[grave hatch]

Then you could probably save this as a single value, yes, but it's easier to read if you don't.

[toxic badger]

Yea I totaly under stand that, but how does this change the fact that moving the mouse 100 Units to the right moves the widget only 60px to the right

there is some factor that is altering that

its not the offset htat is wrong

[toxic badger]

Take a look at that video

[pallid gyro]

I also tried binding to the ISequencer's various change delegates in 5.4.4 and I'm not sure they're working either, I'm trying to make a 'read only' data channel that can still be moved but the relative key positions are always absolute relative to the section (it's midi notes yada etc)

[grave hatch]

It does sound like an oversight.

[toxic badger]

Especiall at the mouse cursor, how it is on the widget in the top left corner but moves of it in the bottom right.

But maybe the ConstraintCanvas is altering it?

[grave hatch]

Is the widget itself scaled? Because the value you need is local to the canvas not the widget being dragged.

[pallid gyro]

BTW everything in the mouse-move/up/down events and the paint event is also available in blueprints, the syntax can be a bit different for exposing slots and the such but figuring out the whole local space geometry math in blueprints is good and fast, it's what I did when I was just starting with slate

easier when iterating takes 2 seconds instead of 60

[grave hatch]

I live coded to victory 😛

[toxic badger]

Maybe the AutoSize does something? I'm just doing auto size here, because otherwise the last added widget will span the full screen width and will block drag events on widgets below

[grave hatch]

AutoSize won't change scale.

It will just set the size of the slot to the desired size of the widget.

[toxic badger]

the i don't think so

[grave hatch]

this is... not what you should do.

MoveableObject->MoveableWidgetRef->MoveableContainer = MoveableContainer;

[pallid gyro]

I started having more faith in live coding recently

[grave hatch]

It's great when not used with uobjects.

[toxic badger]

I wanted to try to pass the canvas to the widget, so I can set the offset insead until i realized that i needed a reference to the slot instead of the canvas and realized i have no clue how i can pass a referenc of the slot to the widget so i can set the offset

[grave hatch]

Second you start involving blueprints or whatever, don't even bother.

The AddSlot() will let you do .Expose(SlotPtr)

(you define slotptr earlier)

It's a raw pointer, though, so be careful.

What I generally do is define the slot ptr on my class and make sure to set it to nullptr.

Then check, every time it's used, if it's null.

And make sure to unset it if the owning widget is ever destroyed.

[toxic badger]

by class you mean the widget right?

[grave hatch]

I mean class.

Whatever owns the thing with the slot.

It could be a widget.

[toxic badger]

yea in my case it is the widget

[grave hatch]

Technically you can get the slot from the child widget, if you get the attached parent widget, get teh children, and iterate the slots for the correct one.

But that's a hassle.

[pallid gyro]

I don't wish to complicate things but for a simple hud-like widget it's pretty easy to set up a dragging canvas without even using any SPanel class or messing around with slots, you just need to override the paint event

[toxic badger]

Yea I think i dont want that 😅

[pallid gyro]

A widget that broadcasts the mouse delta when it is moved, yada yada

I did that for my pianoroll when I wanted a 'floating transport'.

[toxic badger]

Yea I don't know, it already took me so long to having a bad working example.

[pallid gyro]

can start with a widget that lets you drag around boxes which are defined with a vector instead, etc.

[toxic badger]

I'm also right now thinking of having the canvas manage the mouse move maybe this will help with the weird mouse scaling

[grave hatch]

Horizontal box is pretty much the easiest widget to do it with. If you want multiple widgets that are draggable, use an overlay with multiple horizontal or vertical boxes.

[toxic badger]

But I think I give up for today

[grave hatch]

Easiest and more efficient than canvases.

[toxic badger]

But arent horizontal and vertical boxes just to stack them horziontally/vertically?

[grave hatch]

Yes.

But you just set the padding of the top/left to position the inner widget of the slot. 1 slot per box.

It's super simple.

[toxic badger]

But won't that be an issue, if you ahve the mouse event on the widget with the horizontal box, that it will block mouse events for the widgets below

Oh or do you mean that the boxes should be outside of the drag widget and manage by a parent?

[pallid gyro]

you want to block it, but anyway it is completly up to you, that's what those FReplys and their various options do

[toxic badger]

check

Yea big thanks to you guys, I probably have to change this, but it still bugs me a lot, to now know why there is a difference between the widget position and the mouse movement what factor that is.

But maybe I switch to vertical and horziontal boxes and then it gets solved

[pallid gyro]

Don't develop too much attachment for your early attempts

[toxic badger]

Yea but you know if I would do that in js, I mean there are quriks don't get me wrong but jus simply moving a div around would just work.

[pallid gyro]

My repo looks like this with all the failed attempts at things, one day I'll clean it up and make it a real product I'm sure

[toxic badger]

But I guess I'm just overseeing a detail

[pallid gyro]

Slate also just works, it just works very well, I don't know, really, I never used JS, it'd probably confuse the shit out of me.

remember that the editor is fully slate

and also remember that the fact that the editor is fully slate means that you can use the Widget Reflector tool to look at a thing and see how the code works

[toxic badger]

yea it has to work, and there might be just somehow some kind of scaling issue which is just a obvious thing for a game engine if you know it ^^

[pallid gyro]

The way widgets behave inside hierarchies is one of the more frustrating aspects of slate, I think there are just too many options and each of the SPanel container widgets may have its own subtle implementation details and when you nest them together it might not work great

[grave hatch]

No it won't.

[pallid gyro]

But it's all perfectly managable, using the simple predictable containers and building with them, the various canvases are really not that neccesary in slate, idk

[grave hatch]

They're nice, but not performant.

They lead to bad widgets, though, I feel.

[toxic badger]

I was just drawn to the canvas, because of the autosize for children and because In UMG this is the thing everbody is using 😅

[pallid gyro]

I had a very similar journey with my pianoroll, at first it was a canvas containing sbuttons

[toxic badger]

• in the tutorials ^^

[pallid gyro]

now it's just an SCompoundWidget with a paint event

[toxic badger]

But when using a horziontal and vertical box, will the widget inside them, fit to it's contents size like with autosize in the canvas?

[grave hatch]

SBox has autosize and you can set padding dynamically.

[toxic badger]

Wow ok that appears to be the choice then 🙂

[pallid gyro]

BTW all my terrible widget code is here, if you want an implementation of a pannable/zoomable panel without using any of the panel classes etc - https://github.com/Amir-BK/unDAW/tree/main/Source/BKMusicWidgets

SBox is often the MVP

The one class that does what you tell it to do and nothing else.

[toxic badger]

Yea thats awesome

[grave hatch]

I made a cool slot manipulator class.

[toxic badger]

Btw is there any page, where I can just look up the widgets?

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/API/Runtime/SlateCore/Widgets/SWidget?application_version=5.1 or just this?

[pallid gyro]

Ah you mean unreal documentation.

[toxic badger]

Yea because it feels like just guessing, looking at that page i see a SBox and a SBoxPanel and I'm not even sure do i need a panel to go with the box or not

[pallid gyro]

I don't think there's anything comprehensive, searching the source code for implementations of SPanel would give you all the panel implementations, etc.

[grave hatch]

Best is to just ask.

We can suggest good ones.

And eventually you just remember them.

[pallid gyro]

And of course all (or almost all) the panels and widgets you see in the UMG designer are all available as slate versions

[grave hatch]

But the Slate/SlateCore /Widgets folder is a great place to look.

[toxic badger]

thats nice 🙂

[toxic badger]

Yea thats what i also tried to follow a little bit to get some directions

[toxic badger]

Yea I also looked at them a little bit, but it's also a bit overwhelming at the beginning

Feels a litle bit like looking at lyra for the first time ^^

[grave hatch]

They have different names in c++ sometimes, though.

"Canvas" in umg is the constraint canvas, for instance.

Size Box is just SBox

[toxic badger]

Yea that constraint canvas i had to figure out ^^

[pallid gyro]

Slate is like the anti Lyra, a real battle tested system that does all it says it does and does it well, Lyra is… other things

[toxic badger]

I've one thing, which I wondered, regarding performance, if I do have the mouse event, this will be called for every widget in the tree regarding what right?

[toxic badger]

Yea also true ^^

[pallid gyro]

OnMouseMoved will be called only for widgets under the cursor, and I think only for the topmost one unless it returns FReply::Unhandled() but I am not sure

[toxic badger]

Because lets say I create a widgeht with SBox, and then i Stack 10 on top of each other all 10 will receive the mouse move event for example

returns FReply::Unhandled() this would just be the function all then i guess right?

[pallid gyro]

all the mouse event functions have an FReply return type

[toxic badger]

And if i disable the cursor none will be called right?

[pallid gyro]

this dictates behavior and is important for dragging and panning and the such, like a pan event can take the cursor off the widget or off screen, that's what the mouse capture reply is for for instance

[toxic badger]

I'm just wondering because if you have 10 widgets and in each of them for each mouse move there is an if to check if it is dragged or not you have 10 x if for every mouse move

[pallid gyro]

it's easy to test

[toxic badger]

Yea true probably got to do that then.

But I guess that there is something, otherwise most of the UI would be a performance issue at some point ^^

[pallid gyro]

The mouse events are probably way cheaper than the actual paint events, and widgets can also tick, but either way yeah of course it can be managed, it IS managed, it's the same in UMG widgets really, the topmost widget gets the mouse event, you can reply with handled or unhandled, unhandled will pass it to the widget below

like, overlays are used ALL the time, sometimes you want them to do things and in other times you don't

that SAssetDrop target for instance

[toxic badger]

Yea thats true

btw because you mention it, what would be the appropriate widgets, for dragging and dropping?

Probably have got to implement it myself right?

becuase DropTarget is a editor widget

[pallid gyro]

SDropTarget inside an SOverlay seems to be the way it's done

It is?

[pallid gyro]

It's actually funny but unreal is like opinionated about some game UI practices and tries to disourage them by not having accessible widgets for them, like right click context menus

It doesn't look like the SDropTarget itself really uses too much editor only functionality, it can probably be largely copy pasted and converted to a runtime widget in your module, but I'd also start with just trying to study it cause it looks like most of the functionality comes from SlateCore "Input/DragAndDrop.h"

Infact when you look at it the OnDragOver/OnDrop etc come from SWidget

meaning you can override these events in any widget

well tbh unreal does have a UMG implementation of drag and drop so maybe I'm just babbling senslessly, fuck do I know. I'm a big noob as well.

[toxic badger]

Yea I was just taking a quick peek at it yesterday and I tought the same copy it strip the things I don't need and adapt it a little bit

[pallid gyro]

Either way looks like overriding those methods is a decent starting point

figuring out how to create and use an FDragAndDropEvent will be the key here

[toxic badger]

For me the whole thing started, because I already hat the drag and drop for the widget perfectly working in UMG

It took me about an hour following a tutorial super easy

[pallid gyro]

(search the engine for FDragDropEvent, find someplace where the context makes sense to you)

[toxic badger]

then I thought, i want to be able to tie id to c++ stuff or at least have a way to be able to reuse it.

Then I found that using UMG with c++ is limited binding things super easy, but having the drag and drop functionality implemented in C++ was tricky.

[pallid gyro]

Once you figure it out it won't appear so tricky any more 🙂

[toxic badger]

Then I realized if you want to create a C++ Widget you probably have to use Slate for that

and ye a ... ^^

[toxic badger]

I hope so and one of the big things I'm hoping, that this is also an investment, because understanding slate better, will give me more tools to work with, and hopefully it results in a cleaner solution

[pallid gyro]

and really dragging and dropping inside your own widget is actually also possible to simply achieve with widgets that report their mouse up/down/move events and cursor deltas via a delegate and a parent that binds to these delegates

in c++ there's freedom

FDragAndDrop is largely for passing data between unrelated widgets

[toxic badger]

Yea for me it's just I want to have a ability bar, where I can drag the abilities around. But I'm using GAS for the abilities, so if I do it in UMG I feel like this would get messy pretty quick

where as having a umg widget that just references a ability, and maybe even has access to the ability component and stuff like that would be so much smoother

Also if you have cooldowns for abilities or are they active or not and stuff like that, feels like it's easy to implement in c++ but blueprint that could get messy.

[pallid gyro]

idk, it can be not terrible in BP either if you design correctly, but personally yeah i'd probably prefer to have some singular base widget that does 'most of the setting up'

[toxic badger]

Yea, because I feel like down the road sooner or later you get to blueprints anyway

[grave hatch]

It's really pretty easy to add right click menus, tbh.

REspond to right click, create a menu wiget and FSlateApplication::Get().PushMenu()

[pallid gyro]

Not my most thought out comment! but tbh i do have context menu phobia and I need to make a bunch and I always procrastinate on it. I need to figure it out, thanks for the pointer.

Is there some way to make the keys read only from the section class (or section editor... or ISequencerSection editor class)? even with my PR that fixes the delegates it's super messy when moving the keys, I'm very close to giving up and just being content with the user being able to rebuild them but idk if there's another path I'm missing, I can't find any 'read only' option or something similar on the integer channel, I'm thinking about making my own data channel implementation which could cool but I'm also not 100% sure I'll be able to prevent the user from directly manipulating the keys through there 😦

Always more rabbit holes to dive into.

[toxic badger]

looks and sounds complicated but also cool 😅

[pallid gyro]

It's not really a slate related question I'm just sneakily trying to get some insight from Daekesh 🙂

[toxic badger]

😅😅

[toxic badger]

FYI the SBox works fine, had to be some scaling issue or whatever with the Canvas

[toxic badger]

Is it possible, that events only propagate upwards or downards, meaning if there are two elements overlapping each other, then only the top one will receiv the mouse event?

[grave hatch]

Correct

Unless you reply Unhandled.

Then it will continue to bubble.

[toxic badger]

Because I have added two sbox to the viewport But even if I reply unhandlich just the one on the top receives the mouse event.

Is this expected and would only parents/child receive the event or is there smth wrong?

[grave hatch]

Which mouse event?

Clicks definitely bubble. I think mouse move is just a void return and I'm not sure if it triggers on everything.

[toxic badger]

The mouse down event it's only triggered for the most top sbox

😦

I added them all tp the vieüort als Triest Petting all of them in a overlay

Even though I return unhandlich the sbox in the back never receives the event

[grave hatch]

Are both sboxes under the cursor?

[toxic badger]

Ok finally figured it out, appears to be, was that the widget itself received mouse hit as assumed 🙂

Thank you guys very much! 🙂

[grave hatch]

Great!

[outer zinc]

[UE] Assertion failed: IsInGameThread() || IsInSlateThread() || IsInAsyncLoadingThread() [File:Runtime/Slate/Public/Framework/Application/SlateApplication.h] [Line: 257]

I am accessing it in a UBlueprintAsyncActionBase. Is there some way to tell the async action "run on game thread" ?

[wind temple]

Use the task system? https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/tasks-systems-in-unreal-engine

[outer zinc]

ahhhh. ok. thats exactly what i needed to hear to trigger my memory i appreciate you. Using

    AsyncTask(ENamedThreads::GameThread, [&]()
    {
        if (IsInGameThread())
        {
            // my stuff
        }
    });

[grave hatch]

Is there a point checking IsInGameThread there?

Also [&] is bad!

[outer zinc]

You are saying because the task is deployed using the named game thread it shouldnt be needed? That may be true but it causes a crash in prod if it isnt on game thread so id rather be safe i guess haha

[outer zinc]

This is a blanket statement that is simply not true in many circumstances. & and this are synonymous, and as i am calling a multicast delegate bound to the class i need to capture the class anway.

[grave hatch]

Capturing everything in scope by reference
and passing it across threads is a terrible idea.

And fair enough. I guess there could be a bug where it goes to thr wrong thread. But you shouldn't silently fail such a monumental error.

[grave hatch]

& and this are not synonymous as & also captures all local variables in scope and function parameters.

Specifically capturing things like smart pointers that you were unaware you were capturing can lead to very hard to track down bugs. Just as an example.

Now if it was a local lambda function, I'd agree, & might be fine, but this is not.

It's very bad practice.

Even if there's nothing in scope in that function, you shouldn't get into the habit of doing it.

And if you just want to capture this, just use this.

[pallid gyro]

Is there any way to make SSplitter just increase in size when one of the elements is resized? Maybe if I wrap it in an SBox and add the delta to the box's height override?

[pallid gyro]

Is it better to have a persistent widget that needs to check for nullptrs or disposable widgets that use references (or guranteed valid pointers, to that purpose)? I suppose it matters on how heavy their instantiation is but basically i'm starting to notice my widgets being sluggish and I'm validating pointers all over the place and I'm wondering if it's a bad practice.

[grave hatch]

Epic's suggestion is to destroy and replace regularly.

[fluid jewel]

Is there a way to set the default # of rows on SMultiLineEditableText?
AI keeps giving me a made up MinDesiredHeight property

[grave hatch]

INVTEXT("\n\n\n\n\n") for 5 rows?

Or put it in an SBox with it's valign set to fill and give it a minimum height.

[fluid jewel]

I'll try an SBox
def don't want to out in blank new lines otherwise I'll have to santiize them, and add them the correct number back when the user is typing no?

[grave hatch]

Yeah.

It was more of a sarcastic reply 😛

The SBox idea definitely works. Done it many times.

[fluid jewel]

😄 Thank you I'll give it a shot

Worked perfectly. thank you

[grave hatch]

Np!

[terse shard]

How does one modify a brush retrieved like that FAppStyle::Get().GetBrush("FocusRectangle");? Where's a brush like that stored?

[grave hatch]

It's stored in a style set that deletes it when the style set is destroyed.

Do you want to modify the existing brush? Or create a new one from it?

[mint comet]

ugh why is Construct's FArguments const reference? Is there a safer way to get mutable arguents to a widget than just using const_cast?

[faint oriole]

Why would my ComboBox show up like this?

As visible, there are options available.

.OnGenerateWidget_Lambda is bound

[faint oriole]

Fixed it by adding .Content() attribute, but I see in the source many other comboboxes don't use this. What's the rundown on .OnGenerateWidget, .OnSelectionChanged and .Content?

I assume .Content is what goes in the main body of the combo box and .OnGenerateWidget is what goes in the dropdown options, and OnSelectionChanged is obvious I guess

[grave hatch]

If you absolutely require the argument, you can add it to the Construct function and then use it in your SNew/SAssignNew

E.g. void Construct(..., int32 Moo); -> SNew(SMyWidget, 5)

[grave hatch]

Did you provide the [] content widget?

Yeah.

[faint oriole]

Yep that did it lol

[grave hatch]

Content is what goes in the main display before opening. GenerateWidget is what goes in the dropdown.

[faint oriole]

Right now in Content i'm just SAssignNew()'ing a textblock and updating the text upon selection change. is that normal to do?

[grave hatch]

What exactly are you trying to pass? You can still copy things by value out of the arguments struct.

[grave hatch]

I thought the generate widget thing also updated the main display when selection changed, but I may be mistaken.

Just do whatever works honestly.

[faint oriole]

Maybe it does, i'll comment out my updating of the text and see if that works on my next build

[faint oriole]

oh, by the way, it didnt work when i commented that out

[rain heron]

I'm slightly confused as to where some odd lag/delay is coming from.

I have a drag'n'drop operation for panning some view.
When the operations OnDragged function gets called, I update the Offset used by the widget i created.

But it appears as if the paint "lags" more than one frame behind.
and I dont know why.

I've tried the widget as its own window, and added to the viewport.
The viewport one appears to have some more lag than the window one, but it too still has a bit of lag.

What could be sources of such lag? What should I try to get rid of it?

[faint oriole]

Anyone know where to look regarding generating thumbnails for a custom asset type

[solar plaza]

hey @faint oriole, this is not enough for you right ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=raiaGRBD_c4

[faint oriole]

No, I'd specifically like to know how to generate thumbnails for a custom, user created asset type

[pallid gyro]

what do you mean by generate? just 'use' a custom thumbnail brush/widget or generate it a thumbnail procedurally from the asset?

[faint oriole]

Generate procedurally

[pallid gyro]

And you know how to override the thumbnail widget with a custom asset type class thingie right?

I think generating thumbnails is even possible in BP and there's an editor utility widget that does it in the cropout sample, once you have an image with an asset path it'd just be about using the image in the custom thumbnail class, you can have a full widget going on in the thumbnail

I'd look for the Static Mesh asset types customization class and try to follow the tree up from there, see what actually populates the brush for the thumbnail, this functionality exists in multiple engine assets that have custom procedural thumbnails like level sequencers and materials.

[grave hatch]

You can use the asset manager to set a custom thumbnail for an asset, I think.

We do it in MD somewhere.

If you want to render a custom thumbnail, it's a bit of an involved process. I just did this (had to make a new material-based thumbnail renderer).

[grave hatch]

What I had to do to achieve that:

• Add LoadThumbnailInfo overload to my asset definition (this adds the correct class to work with the editable thumbnails)
• Create a new thumbnail scene based on the static mesh thumbnail scene. (Check *ThumbnailScene classes)
• Create a new thumbnail renderer based on the static mesh thumbnail renderer (Check *ThumbnailRenderer classes)
• Register the renderer with the thumbnail manager (UThumbnailManager::Get().RegisterCustomRenderer (don't forget unregister))

It will use the saved thumbnail image until the asset is loaded/opened, then it will switch to the thumbnail renderer.

[pallid gyro]

uhm... is any of the FSlateDrawElements statics convenient to paint a small circle shape or is this a job for a MakeBox with a circle brush?

[grave hatch]

Hmm. Only if it has a dot or circle item, I guess.

[pallid gyro]

You're right! I should paint a diamond shape instead.

[rain heron]

How do you properly scale child widgets of a cusomt Panel?
Just passing the scale to the child widget layout in the Arrange Children function seems to not be enough.
Well, input bounds and painting is mostly correct, but Cursor and Text Selection of Editable Text Boxes are not scaling.

Ah... setting bHasRelativeLayoutScale to true in the constructor and implementing GetRelativeLayoutScale seems to have fixed it

[pallid gyro]

Is anyone perhaps familiar with a simple way to surround a slate draw element with an outline? In this case I'm drawing a gradient to make a rounded box and want to give it a dark outline -

[pallid gyro]

I guess make lines works but it's a bit ugly and slows things down significantly, maybe drawing the whole thing with a brush would work better, I need to stop being a brush noob -

[grave hatch]

A 9-split brush would be the way to go, I think?

[pallid gyro]

I'm familiar with the concept of 9 slices from other engines, is there a way to configure a brush with this behavior in unreal?

I'm a total brush noob (and in general I'm just trial and erroring these paint functions, had a miserable time getting makebox do what I want it to)

[grave hatch]

The "Box" item is a 9-split I think.

If you're painting directly.

[pallid gyro]

Gotcha

But I'm still not really getting it, like, I need a brush that has a border for this to actually give me a visible outline, right?

[grave hatch]

You would make a brush with 9 pixels (if you want a simple color like you have there)

The 8 outer pixels would be your border. The middle pixel would be the centre colour.

Then set your margin to 1 pixel on either side I suppose.

Though I don't see where to set the margin in that method...

Maybe it's already in the brush?

[pallid gyro]

I think this looks promising.

I'll try to figure it out from here, thank you once again Daekesh

Should also put on my to do list "start using style classes instead of loading brushes from soft paths like a lazy person"

[grave hatch]

Np!

Lol

Once you have that first style class you never look back!

[vale stump]

I have a UObject inherited class that is registered to the settings panel through the ISettingsModule. the UObject class has its Uproperties that are given functionality through meta=() modifiers.
i want to add to it an SWidget button and maybe some other things, however i cant figure out how to make them work together.
does anyone know how to do this?