Warhammer MMO
| role | UI Engineer |
| software | Unreal Engine • Photoshop • Jetbrains Rider • Perforce |
| languages | C++ • Unreal Blueprint |
| team size |  50+ |
| platforms | TBD |
| developer | Jackalyptic Games™, a NetEase Games Studio™ |
The recently announced project at Jackalyptic Games is a new MMO set in one of the Warhammer IP's, yet to be revealed. As the only UI Engineer, it's my job to make sure that all of the UI is up and running, as well as work on low-level solutions in Slate, like building globally accessible Widget's registered by tag and accessed through an Anchoring system. This solution not only created a ton of opportunity for easily accessible UI without using a bubble method or directly referencing the widget, but also avoided including hard references altogether.
I also built a robust Widget Pooling system through an Editor module, where we can registered weak references when widgets are removed, and reaquire them if we need to reallocate the same widget class type. The main driver was a K2Node similar to thee K2Node_CreateWidget. It was a fun project that included some 'just for fun' features like colorizing the K2Node, and giving it a custom icon through SlateStyleSets.
Finally, I spent a great deal of effort in extending the Common UI and building our own layer on top of it. Common UI is an amazing system out-of-the-box, but there's also areas that leave it wanting when it ccomes to using it in Blueprint. This is something I've worked on continously as we moved forward, adding any new content pipeline advancements I could think of.
There isn't much else I can say about the new project that hasn't come from the press release. Stay Tuned for more!