Scooter Utilities

Your Swiss Army Knife of editor tools for Unreal Engine

logo

User Documentation · Report Bug · Request Feature

Scooter Utilities is an Unreal Engine editor plugin which contains miscellaneous artist/developer utilities, allowing you to quickly navigate to disk files, restart/reload your projects, and to help keep some settings persistent between restarts in the editor.

Features
Usage
Installation
Supported Platforms
Dependencies
Contributions
References / Inspirations / Credits

Features

Restart the editor from the File menu.
Open your project folder in File Explorer from the File menu.
Adjust the size of the Unreal Editor interface fonts and widgets to what’s comfortable or for doing presentations.
Set the Maximum FPS value, and have that always set as you default inside Unreal Engine’s Editor.
Turn on the viewport fps display and have it stay on after restarting the engine.
Download and Install from FAB

[!WARNING] This plugin isn’t yet available on fab.com as of this writing, but it is aniticpated that it will be soon. The documentation written here assumes you’ve downloaded and installed the plugin from Fab.

If you’ve gotten Scooter Utilities through Fab Marketplace, downloading and installing is handled through fab.com and the unreal marketplace.

From fab.com, after purchase, click the Download link on the Scooter Utilities product listing.
A web pop-up will appear, with a link to the Epic Games Launcher - click that link and open the Epic Games Launcher.
In the Launcher, scroll down to your Fab Library, and find, “Scooter Utilities,” and click Install to Engine.
If prompted, select the engine version that you want the plugin installed to, and you should be good to go.

If you’ve gotten, or plan to get, a source-code version of Scooter Utilities, and need to install it manually, please follow the Installation Instructions in the Developer Documentation.

Enable Scooter Utilities

To enable ScooterUtils in your project, navigate to Edit > Plugins, click the checkbox next to the plugin’s icon to enable it for your project.

Menus

[!NOTE] Make sure you enable the Scooter Utilities plugin. You can do this by navigating to Edit > Plugins and searching for Scooter Utilities.

Two menus items are added to the Main Menu* – these are Restart Editor… and Show Project in Explorer. Both are found under the File Menu.

File > Restart Editor…

This will shutdown and restart unreal engine, prompting you to save any unsaved changes, and reload your project on restart. This is the same behavior you see when, for example, you enable or disable a plugin.

This feature is for anyone that frequently restarts the engine to test code changes, clear undo stacks, refresh the system, etc. It’s also nice for those times you’ve been working in the editor for a while and things just start to feel… um… off. Just hit Restart Editor… and you’re project will shutdown and restart – no launcher popping up and prompting for a project to load, and no searching in file explorer to find the uproject file to open.

File > Show Project in Explorer

This will open file explorer focused on your main project folder – i.e. the same folder as your project’s .uproject file.

Being able to open the project in Explorer is nice for when you’ve opened a project from the Launcher and need to know where it’s actually stored on disk. You can also do this by right clicking on assets in the content browser, which will take you do your project’s content folder, but this menu makes takes you directly to the project root.

Persistent Editor Properties

Scooter Utilities Editor Preferences are used to configure settings that don’t reset every time you restart the editor or create a new project.

To view Scooter Utilities’ Editor Preferences, navigate to Edit > Editor Preferences… in Unreal Engine’s top menu bar. Next, select Scooter Utilities in the sidebar in the Plugins category.

Name	Description
Screen Real Estate
Application Scale	Adjust the size of the Unreal Editor interface fonts and widgets to what’s comfortable or for doing presentations.
FPS
Show Viewport FPS
Max FPS
About
Version	Scooter Utilities Version (read-only)

Prefs: Screen Real Estate: Persistent Editor Scale

[!NOTE] This setting overrides the setting in Editor Preferences > Appearance, but when you disable this setting, the editor will default back to the normal 1.0 setting as a scale value. If your setting under Editor Preferences > Appearance is not 1.0, you may need to restart the editor to get the system to pick up the correct Application Scale.

Choose Edit > Editor Preferences from the Main Menu bar, scroll down and select Plugins/Scooter Utilities – this setting is in the Screen Real Estate section.

The Persistent Editor Scale value is a percentage relative to the default screen size of elements like fonts, buttons, and other widgets in the Unreal Engine UI. I like to work with all the fluff scaled down to about 80% of what’s considered “normal,” so I set the Persistent Editor Scale to 0.8.

As of Unreal Engine 5.4 there is an Application Scale setting under Editor Preferences/Appearance, which works great, but resets between different projects. The setting in Scooter Utilities is persistent and works globally across all projects.

Prefs: Max FPS

Choose Edit > Editor Preferences from the Main Menu bar, scroll down and select Plugins/Scooter Utilities – this setting is in the Max FPS section.

Persistent Editor Max FPS Setting overrides the console variable setting, t.MaxFPS, which sets the engine’s maximum editor frame rate. The Max FPS setting is persistent and will stay set across all projects and restarts. Set it to 0 to let the system and it’s console settings take over again.

To ensure the system is running as freewheeling as possible, turn off Smooth Frame Rate and Used Fixed Frame Rate under Edit > Project Preferences, General Settings/Framerate (These are typically off by default).

Prefs: Show FPS

Choose Edit > Editor Preferences from the Main Menu bar, scroll down and select Plugins/Scooter Utilities – this setting is in the Show FPS Onscreen section.

Viewport Toggle: Show FPS turns on the FPS display in the editor viewport, and keeps it on between restarts.

This is the same functionality as the viewport hamburger menu’s Show FPS setting, but this will stay enabled between engine/editor restarts.

Contributions

Do you know how to code up a cool tool or feature that would be good to include in this project? Interested in contributing with writing documentation or anything else? Did you find a bug?! Come up with a new idea?! Please help out!

report any issues.
request new features.
To show your support for my work, Throw me a bone! please TODO TODO - rate/review the plugin on fab, and/or donate to my GitHub projects.

Contributing

If you lean into the technical side of things and are comfortable using GitHub, check the issues link to find something that might be fun to tackle. The best way to help would be to contribute directly to the code or documentation: Grab a fork and submit a pull request with you’re changes. For technical details regarding the ScooterUtils GitHub repo, check out our developer documentation.

If you really don’t want to have to learn GitHub, but would still like to contribute, just follow these links to report a bug or request something new you’d like to see.

To show your support for my work, Throw me a bone! please TODO TODO - rate/review the plugin on fab, and/or donate to my GitHub projects.

Support/Contact

Feel free to reach out to me on the Unreal Slackers discord. I’m @Fragmanget_. There is a ton of other Unreal programmers up there, so if I’m not around to help, someone else may be able to get you going.
You can also reach me on my personal Discord Server (@cptvideo), via LinkedIn, or email.

Credits

Project Link: ScottKirvan/ScooterUtils
CHANGELOG
TODO