DISCLAIMER: I do not claim to be endorsed or supported by Epic Games in any way.
Currently Unreal Engine 4 Plus is still in semi-active development with new / backported features being added, as it is still in active development this means that there are possible bugs and slight regressions sometimes. Every feature from base 4.26 will function as originally intended with no setbacks.
Visual Studio 2022 Support#
Initially 4.26 left off in early 2021 with support for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019. This caused problems when using VS22, so I added support without removing older VS versions unlike UE5!
Eventually when it is needed, I plan on adding VS 2026 support and newer Windows SDK versions as well as possibly moving C++ version from 14 to 20.
Curve Table Editor#
In Unreal Engine 5.5 they finally added an editor for curve tables (CSV data) so you did not need an external editor anymore. This feature was early on my priority list to add as it is such a key feature unreal completely lacked since 2014.
Another key addition for this was being able to right click and create a curve table without ever needing to import a CSV!
Mesh Overlays#
Mesh overlays are a very simple way of creating overlaying visual effects such as a power buff or health boost, this was initially added in 5.1. Currently my backport does not support HISM’s (Hierachal Instanced Static Meshes). Another feature I implemented was being able to set a default overlay in the skeletal mesh editor as the UE 5 mesh overlays cannot do that as it only shows in the static mesh editor.
UI Common#
This is a very short backport as it is the 4.27 version of CommonUI, I will slowly upgrade it eventually. For more information you can read Epic Games’ Common UI Information.
Material Upgrades#
Since it has been years since 4.26 there have been many niceties in UE5 such as named reroute nodes or other easier short hand ways of achieving something.
Named Reroute Nodes
Named reroute nodes provide a much cleaner and simpler way to organise material graphs which can get absurdly messy, this is among one of the best features added to UE so this was among the first things I saught to backport fully.
Colour Ramps
Colour Ramps are a much loved feature that blenders materials use for many things, it got partially added in UE 5.6 but disabled due to a bug. I thought the node was really useful so I backported it (minus the bug)!
