Feb 20, 2025

Create a Custom Plugin in Unreal Engine 5

Let's a create basic plugin for Unreal Engine 5 so all our projects can share resources.

Unreal Engine C++

Unreal Engine 5 adding a new plugin via the plugin options screen — Adding a plugin

GitHub Repo

Plugins in Unreal Engine

Game Engine

Unreal Engine 5.5.3

IDE

Rider 2024.3.5

Project Name

MyProject

macOS Sequoia 15.3.1

Let's create a plugin. A custom plugin can be helpful when needing to share resources amongst different projects.

First, add a new plugin. Either add the new plugin via the editor or IDE. Rider had the option to add the plugin to the project's uproject plugins list. The modules might have to rebuild on the next start up. Add a new plugin however you feel comfortable, I'm choosing a blank plugin for simplicity.

Rider IDE adding a new Unreal Plugin — Alternatively you can add a plugin via Rider

With this example we created a Blank plugin, we've could have just as easily created a Blueprint Library Plugin to speed up the process, but I wanted to take it step by step to see the pieces come together.

In this example I'm creating a Blueprint Function Library plugin, so we'll need to create a new Blueprint Library class that lives in the plugin. We can do that via the IDE.

Rider IDE creating a new Blueprint Function Library Class inside MyPlugin — Adding a new Blueprint Function Library class for MyPlugin

When editing the Blueprint Library, in my experience, I had to always restart the editor to see the changes take effect.

To keep things simple I wanted to create a basic function that returns the distance to an actor using a line trace. Doing this will hopefully reduce some boilerplate future code. The meta options inside the UFUNCTION macro are awesome because we add DisplayName and Keywords to our function for ease of use in Blueprints.

MyPluginBFLibrary.h

#pragma once

#include "CoreMinimal.h"
#include "Kismet/BlueprintFunctionLibrary.h"
#include "MyPluginBFLibrary.generated.h"


UCLASS()
class UMyPluginBFLibrary : public UBlueprintFunctionLibrary
{
	GENERATED_UCLASS_BODY()

	UFUNCTION(BlueprintCallable, BlueprintPure, meta = (DisplayName = "Get Distance to Actor in Front", Keywords = "Get Distance to Actor in Front"), Category = "MyPlugin")
	static float GetDistanceToActorInFront(AActor* MyActor, const float TraceLength = 50000.f);
};

MyPluginBFLibrary.cpp

#include "MyPluginBFLibrary.h"

UMyPluginBFLibrary::UMyPluginBFLibrary(const FObjectInitializer& ObjectInitializer)
: Super(ObjectInitializer)
{

}

float UMyPluginBFLibrary::GetDistanceToActorInFront(AActor* MyActor, const float TraceLength)
{
	if (MyActor == nullptr) { return 0.f; }
	
	UWorld* const World = MyActor->GetWorld(); 
	FVector StartLocation = MyActor->GetActorLocation();
	FVector TraceDistance = MyActor->GetActorForwardVector() * TraceLength;
	FVector EndLocation = StartLocation + TraceDistance;
	FHitResult OutHit;

	bool bHit = World->LineTraceSingleByChannel(OutHit, StartLocation, EndLocation, ECC_Visibility);

	if (bHit)
	{
		return OutHit.Distance;
	}
	else
	{
		return 0.f;
	}
}

After we rebuild we now have a custom plugin that we can use in our Blueprints.

Unreal Engine 5 Blueprint inside test actor using line trace by channel to get distance to hit actor — Before the plugin

Unreal Engine 5 Blueprint using the MyPlugin pure function to get distance to actor — After the plugin

I hope this helped. I look forward to extending this plugin and adding helpful utilities that I can use across projects. It'll be fun to try new things while keeping functions isolated to their own plugin container.

Harrison McGuire

Create a Custom Plugin in Unreal Engine 5

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