Release Date
May 17, 2024
Released Status
Released
Potentially breaking changes — Width Settings Renaming ⚠️
In this update we’ve renamed the text parameter
Width Settings to Wrap Settings — this should help avoid some confusion while making it work more intuitively. It also means that you may encounter warning messages after upgrading Expressive Text to the latest version. In most cases you can just recompile your blueprints to get rid of these warnings, but certain cases could require you to update your blueprint logic to work with Wrap Settings, especially if you used custom width settings values before.Official support for Unreal Engine 5.4 ⤴️
You can keep using Expressive Text on the latest and greatest!
The power of Auto-Size 📏
Utilizing the
Use Auto Size option to make any text occupy the maximum amount of room and fit snugly to the parent box. Best part is this option is available for both actors and widgets.
Head over to Wrap Settings and Auto Size to learn more!
Looking stylish! ✨
With this update we’ve also added a few new presets which leverage the existing custom materials coupled with new animations to make your text pop! As always, you are free to use them straight out-of-the-box or as a base for your own custom styles.
The new style names are:
- Rush 🚗
- Squeak 🌟
- Labyrinth 🎱
- Vaporwave 🌃
Make way for L e t t e r S p a c i n g 🛰️
Like the name implies, the
Letter Spacing parameter available via the style editor lets you control the distance between each letter uniformly.
At this moment Letter Spacing will not work with Reveal Rate, and while animating letter spacing is possible, it can create text layout glitches.
Addressing packaging issues 📦
Previous versions of Expressive Text occasionally had issues packaging styles which resulted in plain white text on packaged projects. This is now addressed and all styles and their dependencies will be automatically cooked.
If this issue still affects your project after this update, please Contact Us!
New blueprint functions 📘
Pausing the Reveal Rate from Blueprints
Calling the new Set Reveal Paused controls the text reveal animation pause/playing state.
Querying the Reveal progress
The Get Reveal Progress function lets you know how far along the reveal animation is. It returns a 0 to 1 value where 0 means the reveal start and 1 means fully revealed.
Asking for Layout and Line information
Bug Fixes and other changes 🐛
Reducing the amount of popup messages
Simultaneous popup messages can get annoying, so we’ve made sure to reduce and re-use the usage of popup and have a less distracting way to ask for user action and give status updates!
Other changes
- Compilation: Added support for IWYU compilation which should eliminate the chance for missing include errors when compiling the plugin yourself.
- Updated the plugin to use the latest version of the Google Fonts repository which unlocks many new fonts added recently to Google Fonts.
- Expressive Text related errors and warning messages that showed up after starting the engine should no longer occur.
- Stopped crash which happened when tweaking flag material parameters on the Style Editor on specific engine versions.
- The plugin now loads on the PreDefault stage which stops crashes related to projects trying to load plugin classes without the plugin being loaded yet
That’s all for now, see you on the next one!
