level-actors

🧠 Brains complement: IF an unreal-engine-skills-manager tool (external MCP) exists in this session, call it with {action: "load", skill: "actors-and-components"} for UE domain knowledge on this topic — correct APIs, architecture, best practices — and treat it as the rubric for any review / "best practices" question. If no such tool is available (e.g. running under Claude Code or Codex without that MCP), skip this line entirely and proceed with this skill alone — do NOT attempt the call.

Level Actors Skill

🔀 Engine owns the basics now. In the Unreal 5.8 consolidation, listing / finding / spawning / moving / transforming / selecting actors moved to Unreal's native toolsets — ActorTools, SceneTools, and EditorAppToolset (selection, camera, PIE, screenshots), reachable via call_tool. Equivalently you can drive unreal.EditorActorSubsystem / unreal.LevelEditorSubsystem directly from execute_python_code (shown throughout below). VibeUE's ActorService was trimmed to only the delta the engine doesn't provide: transform lock (set_actor_lock_location), absolute-transform flags, preserve-scale-ratio, viewport camera framing (get_actor_view_camera / calculate_actor_view / set_viewport_camera), and full property dumps (get_all_properties). ActorService.add_actor / set_property / get_property no longer exist — use the engine toolsets or EditorActorSubsystem for spawning and property edits.

Critical Rules

⚠️ unreal.Rotator(a, b, c) is (roll, pitch, yaw) — always pass by keyword

Python's FRotator constructor takes roll, pitch, yaw (X, Y, Z), not the C++ FRotator(Pitch, Yaw, Roll) order. Passing a yaw positionally lands it in pitch, and nothing warns you — the call succeeds and the actor is simply wrong:

# WRONG - pitches the actor onto its nose; yaw stays 0
actor.set_actor_rotation(unreal.Rotator(0.0, yaw, 0.0), False)

# CORRECT
actor.set_actor_rotation(unreal.Rotator(roll=0.0, pitch=0.0, yaw=yaw), False)