Editor & Tooling

Automation, custom editor tools, the asset pipeline, Slate/UMG.

Unreal Engine is a Slate-based application with a full extension API. Custom windows, panels, asset actions, Details panel customizations, toolbars, commandlets. That extension layer determines whether working on a project is smooth or painful.

In this section:

Slate — the engine’s low-level UI framework,
UMG and Editor Utility Widgets,
the main entry points for editor customization,
Blutilities / Editor Utility Blueprints — quick editor scripts that require no C++ compilation,
commandlets — headless operations on assets and data, run from the command line.

Why it matters

Once a project has hundreds of assets and a mass of repetitive operations, the lack of custom tools starts to cost a lot of time.

Good editor tools are infrastructure that shortens the feedback loop and eliminates entire classes of errors.

What lives here

I write about tools that I build myself or that have solved a concrete problem in the pipeline. I do not rewrite the API reference. What interests me is the practical context: when to use Slate, when UMG, when commandlets, and where each of the three hits its limits.

Editor & Tooling

Why it matters

What lives here

ShouldCreateSubsystem and the subsystem class hierarchy

A Blueprint subsystem does not get created in a packaged build

Movie files in Content/Movies stay outside the pak — the two fields that change it

A tickable UObject — how to build one, what to keep in mind

A dispatcher broadcast from inside a handler does not see later bindings

Subsystem and manager actor lifecycles — who, when, and in what order

Set Timer by Event with Time = 0.0 never fires

A Blueprint node tooltip stops at the first @param

Casting to an interface misses Blueprint implementations