Archive case / 003
CommonUI Menu
A WWE 2K-inspired front-end menu prototype built around layered activatable widgets and deterministic focus restoration.
Input & UI experiment
Unreal Engine 5.3 / CommonUI / UMG / Enhanced Input
Engineering question
How can layered Unreal menus remain deterministic when navigation, back actions, and focus all change during transitions?
Focus
- Input ownership
- Focus restoration
- Layered navigation
The technical question
What was being tested
How can layered Unreal menus remain deterministic when navigation, back actions, and focus all change during transitions?
Implementation notes
What I built
- 01
Activatable stack
A CommonUI root owns layered screens so only the topmost activatable widget is authoritative for input.
- 02
Focus recovery
Each screen restores its last valid focused child when it becomes active again, with a deliberate default fallback.
- 03
Transition safety
A transition guard prevents re-entrant push and pop requests from corrupting the navigation stack during animation.
System map
The working path
A compact model of the relationships this experiment was designed to make explicit.
01
Game boot
02
CommonUI root
03
Activatable widget stack
04
Active layer and restored focus
Evidence and limits
What this proves
The experiment is about behavioural fidelity: only the active layer receives input and parent focus returns predictably.
The implementation is Blueprint-first and deliberately tests interaction behaviour; it is not presented as a full production front-end or a platform glyph system.
Next iteration
Add data-driven screen registration, dynamic input glyphs, and automated back-stack tests under rapid controller input.