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During the early stages of Lumo 2 development, I leaned heavily on Ben Ui’s ImGui for Unreal Engine 5 fork. I love Dear ImGui, and I’ve been using it off-and-on in projects for a few years. It’s simple to use, and having a nice debug UI to access cheat modes, and see internal state is a Godsend.
But it’s not perfect. Having to toggle the input mode is a pain in the ass, and, more annoyingly, I could only ever get it working reliably on Win64 builds, defeating the point somewhat.
I’ve started Next Thing, and I want to have a similar view on internal state. Cheat modes are easily handled through CheatManager, and I’m using Data Driven CVars to toggle debug features on and off, so there’s no need for on-screen buttons.
I figure there must be a way to have debug text, on-screen, in fixed positions — not attached to actors as you normally see — as the engine’s Stat commands do it. I’ve just never seen an explanation of how that works, or any documentation on it, so I thought I’d write it up in case I’m not alone.
AHud has a DebugCanvas, and you’re free to draw widgets onto this, as long as any attempts to do so happen within the A_Hud->DrawHUD() call chain.
As for how to get text onto the canvas, I’m using FCanvasTextItem:
/**
* Constructor.
*
* @param InPosition Draw position.
* @param InText String to draw.
* @param InFont Font to draw with.
* @param InColor Color to draw the text with.
* */
Followed by DebugCanvas->DrawItem(MyFCanvasTextItem);
My DrawHud function now contains a series of calls to dump out internal state to canvas items and position them on-screen. This doesn’t look as fancy as ImGui, but it works everywhere, and having debug elements on console variable toggles is veh nice.
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