Over 83% of the Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) community that we have surveyed last month indicated that developers prefer to create the gameplay of the game using Blueprints, along with C++. The Blueprint integration is one of the most requested features and you can see the rest findings in the infographic we created with the summary of the Unreal Engine 4 survey.

In Coherent UI 2.0 we introduce an important new feature for the Coherent UI for Unreal Engine 4 plugin. Game developers will be able to script their entire UI through Blueprints without the need to write C++ code. Designers will be able to both create and add functionality to the game UI without the intervention of programmers. Implementing UI interactions can now be done literally in minutes.

The UI Blueprint scripting works two-way – you can send data and trigger events from the game in the UI and vice-versa you can implement game logic in response to things happening in the interface. Our UI scripting allows sending all UE4 primitive types both ways as well as any UObject. UObject properties are automagically made available in the UI JavaScript.

The Coherent UI Sample game will come with two classic examples that will illustrate how to script your UI from within Blueprints. The sample is available with all versions of Coherent UI, you can freely download a trial.

This first screenshot shows a Blueprint that sends the entire Player Character object to the UI where its properties like the player name, ammo, health etc. are used to populate the HUD.

Sending the player character to the UI via Blueprints

The whole character is automatically exported and all the properties it has in the Blueprint or C++ code will be available in the UI as well.

The second example shows how to load a new level from Blueprint when the user clicks “Start game” on the game menu. Until now you had to write the game logic in C++, now you can simply handle in Blueprint the event triggered by the UI when the button is pressed and load the level from there. The UI can also freely send data to the game.

As you can see from the screenshot, the Blueprint is very simple. You listen to the event triggered by the UI, read the name of the level and load it.

Handling a UI event in Blueprints

We believe that the new Blueprint UI scripting will make working with Coherent UI even more easy and fast for game development teams. Non-programmers now have the full set of tools to create and integrate any type of UI into the game.

We are working on more video tutorials to illustrate how to use the power of Coherent UI and make great user interfaces quickly and efficiently, among them a tutorial on the Blueprint scripting. What tutorials would you like to see? Share with us you ideas on our forum.
The Blueprint support will continue to improve and the next step will be to provide an even more integrated UI development experience in the UE4 editor. Stay tuned for more details in the following weeks.