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I spent some of this week making an I/O system for level scripting in Unreal for @sleightofhand.game! I have long had thoughts on why these kick ass. Here's an unusually long blog post on: -why these kick ass -why they are necessary -how mine works -etc etc www.joewintergreen.com/i-o-systems-...

Cool qol details in the tool: -Dropdowns for everything -If targeting multiple actors it tells you how many -Button to duplicate an input -Button to select all with same name -Button to assign unique names to selected actors -Auto-assigns targetnames based on actor labels/vice versa as appropes

Added some debug vis for both instant and in-flight IO outputs today

moved it into a plugin so i can more easily release it at some point

this is fully a plugin so it can be project-agnostic, cpp'd a few things that were bp before (mostly still BP) etc. swapped it over at work so that i am not maintaining two versions. the debug stuff is fun to look at. @radiatoryang.bsky.social made duck hunt using buttons, movers and timers

robert has made such a good example of what i/o systems are good for here with no-code duckhunt. our buttons get pressed by physics so you can throw objects at the buttons and it stops them moving. so many things someone might implement if it's ok to not involve coders or code

fun to watch the debug on these lasers that turn each other on and off

got back to trying to finish this off so yall can give me money for it today. not quite there yet but added some new features: -disabling an output without deleting it, v useful for testing etc -"unlocking" an output so that you can type target/function names manually instead of choosing them

The latter is useful for addressing actors that aren't present at editor-time but which you know will exist at runtime, like: the player. so if you know the player will exist and has a function called "die" you could call that even though it's not there in the editor for instance

Also various options for quick selection etc - Select By Name, Select Related, Duplicate Unique (meaning clone the whole setup with unique names so the relationships are also cloned), Name Unique (rename anything that shares a name), draw debug lines for all actors or just the selection, etc etc

if you do enter your targetnames and function names manually, but switch back to "locked" mode the text goes orange to indicate "this might be bad" since it's an "invalid" output basically; it won't be valid til later. really you would just leave it on the other mode. in Source these always show red

Also I had it that if you had multiple actors selected it just didn't show anything (because editing multiple actor's output sets at once makes no sense) but I just made it that it shows them all read-only and with the owning actor name so you can get an overview

and now go-to buttons at each end: select the thing that owns the output, or select the target. hooray

also explanatory tooltips...havin' fun

welp that's what i ended up getting done tonight

another new feature: if you frequently want to address runtime-spawned actors that aren't in the level at editor time, and don't want to manually type them every time, you can add them and their functions to Project Settings so they're always available in the io tool

and another one: if you don't have anything io-able selected it shows you a list of all possible io-able things in your project, click 'em to spawn 'em.