News ticker plugin
Polygon labs
March 2020 - June 2020
The Ipsum Ticker plugin is a plugin used to display news ticker headlines from the Ipsum back-end service in a UE4 application that can then be layered over video footage. It was a really cool project that required me to think quite differently about the code I was writing. Previously I had worked pretty much exclusively on standalone applications, not tools for creating applications. I had to juggle a lot of things such as how to make it user friendly so that a designer could create new content quickly and easily, as well as robust enough so that if a surprise feature request came in at the last minute we could support it.
My Role
I worked alone while building the base features for the plugin. After that was completed, a designer worked with me to build a news ticker for a client using my plugin, as well as to help me figure out what parts were user friendly and what parts were not.
Technology
Unreal Engine
Challenges
It was a challenge to adapt my mindset from building standalone applications to building a tool instead, as well as to try and make it as user friendly as possible so that a designer could create a news ticker with as few updates as possible. Some of the technical challenges I ran into are:
I ran into an issue with an Unreal Engine feature called Pixel Snapping which makes 2d text look sharp, however with moving text this was causing jittering issues. I was able to make a modification to the engine code which allowed me to toggle pixel snapping on and off as needed.
We ran into many issues while trying to deploy an actual app using the plugin, generally relating to what debugging and logging tools are needed to actually identify issues with a build. Definitely a lot of lessons learned from this point.
The plugin needed to be highly configurable to support connection to different back end systems without having to create a new build for each. This was my first time implementing a configuration file feature.