Screens in the world¶

Three screens ship with the template: the checkout display, the card terminal and the office computer. All three are children of BP_ScreenBase, and two of them have no graph at all.

Building one¶

Create a child of BP_ScreenBase.
Set ScreenMesh to your monitor mesh.
Set Display.WidgetClass to your widget, a child of BP_ScreenBaseWidget.
Position and scale Display so it sits on the glass.
Move ReadPose until leaning in frames the screen the way you want.

BP_CheckoutScreen is exactly that and nothing more: two values in the Details panel and an empty graph. It is the one to copy.

What you get from the base¶

Component	What it is
`ScreenMesh`	The physical screen, the root
`Display`	The `WidgetComponent` for the panel
`ReadPose`	Where the camera goes when you lean in

And the behaviour, with nothing to wire: an outline and a prompt, E to lean in with the field of view blending, the crosshair and prompt hidden, whatever you were carrying released, movement and look frozen, the mouse cursor shown, Tab or E to leave, and SetPowered(false) to switch the whole thing off.

Function	What to do with it
`SetHost(NewHost)`	Called by the screen. Leave it alone
`BindHost`	Empty in the base. Override it and subscribe to your host

There is a matching BeginRead(Reader) on the actor, called when someone leans in. Override it if your screen has to wake up rather than simply be looked at.

Sizing the display¶

Set DrawSize to how many screen pixels the panel covers when you lean in, and Scale to the physical width in centimetres divided by that DrawSize. A widget rendered at 1024 across but covering 1411 pixels on the monitor is magnified, and no anti-aliasing hides that.

Then lay the widget out at a fixed design size inside a scale box, so changing DrawSize re-renders instead of re-flowing your layout.

Two settings on the widget component, and one on every button inside it:

Setting	Value	Why
Blend Mode	`Transparent`	`Masked` ghosts under temporal anti-aliasing
Window Focusable	off	A focusable window steals keyboard input
Is Focusable, on each button	off	Otherwise `Tab` walks a focus rectangle around the screen

Positioning the panel on the mesh¶

Measure the glass, not the bounds. A monitor's bounding box includes its stand, so the front face of the box is not the front of the screen.

A real bezel is not symmetrical. The shipped POS display has 1.6 cm at the top and 3.3 at the bottom; a panel centred in the mesh looks like a laptop, not a till.

Position and scale are Details panel values, so re-exporting the mesh means nudging two fields.

Screen space instead¶

BP_DrawerWidget, the change readout on the till drawer, is in screen space rather than world space so it stays readable while you move your head over the drawer. It still belongs to the drawer, and it still lives in the World/ widget folder.

Join the Discord