Although UE is a game engine, it is not limited to writing games—you can even use it to write Win32 GUI applications 😏. Typically, we create a UE game project using the Editor and build our own classes based on it for use in the game. However, if you don’t want to create a game project, UE also supports Standalone Applications that can construct their own programs autonomously from the main function, fully controlling which Modules to enable without relying on the engine’s own logical architecture. This can also serve as a lightweight method for learning and testing UE modules.
Note: UE does not provide a direct method to create a Standalone Application, so I wrote a tool to create a Program project: hxhb/ue4program, and implemented a demo for a standalone tool: hxhb/UE4Launcher.