Announcing UltraTerm’s first release: v1.0 alpha demo! You can download it here immediately:

NOTE: Launching external programs requires Windows 10 version 1809 or higher.

Alpha Demo Reel

What is UltraTerm?

UltraTerm is a GPU accelerated terminal emulator and general purpose monospace text renderer that runs within Unreal Engine, as well as a Text-Based User Interface (TUI) development framework that can be used to build native applets using C++ or Unreal’s Blueprint visual scripting system.

UltraTerm screens can be added to any user interface as a UMG Widget, or rendered in the game world on the surface of any mesh.

UltraTerm is a real terminal emulator: It can launch console programs and parse ANSI escape codes, emulating the behavior of real video terminals. You can now run your favorite progams such as Vim or Emacs from within Unreal Engine and Unreal Editor!

UltraTerm is high performance: Screen stress test benchmarks as high as 800 FPS with nearly zero overhead on the game thread.

Some of UltraTerm’s Additional Features

UltraTerm features a special CellBuffer that supports infinitely nested layers with full alpha blending, so user interfaces and animations can be composed together on the screen in powerful ways.

UltraTerm has a post-process effects render chain that can be edited in Unreal’s Material graph editor, and comes with a number of effects that simulate vintage CRT screens.

UltraTerm has a rich themeing system and custom font atlas that allows for mixing many font faces and tilesets together on the screen at the same time.

UltraTerm can render images, videos, and SceneCaptureComponent2D streams to term cells as glyphs and solid colors.

UltraTerm has a Filter system: Attach Filters to individual ScreenObjects to mutate their cells before they’re written to the CellBuffer, such as changing their glyphs and background colors.

UltraTerm also features a special Actor class for placing terminal screens in the game world that allows for precise control of the player camera and UltraTerm’s settings when a terminal is in use.

What’s Next?

UltraTerm is under continuous development, with a lot more features and improvements planned! The next phase will be the Unreal plugin closed alpha phase. If you’d like to potentially try integrating the UltraTerm alpha plugin into your project, come say hello on Discord .

UltraTerm will eventually be released as a source-available paid plugin on the Unreal Marketplace, and currently there are also plans to release a shareware version of the plugin for use in Unreal Editor. A binary executable will always be freely available for use as a general purpose terminal emulator.

Dev updates are posted frequently on Twitter .