As may have also read in the blog post on the Unreal Engine website we are continuing to invest into further improving and growing the Epic Developer Community as well as Epic’s overall set of developer/creator-focused websites.
We have two big objectives with all of these changes:
The Epic web experience across the different developer and creator tools/engine/services is pretty fragmented today. Sites have different designs, run on different backends, and often each of our sites behave as silos from one another. Our mission is to unify our sites so that all of the content that we have properly comes together. It will make the experience smoother for everyone, and also reduce the maintenance and tech debt for us.
The community is front and center for us. Without you, there is no Unreal Engine, UEFN, Twinmotion, or any of our other tools and services. Our goal is to make sure that we offer the web infrastructure and features that will further foster the community, and by doing so help enable everyone to succeed with your projects.
Today a number of new features and changes have gone online:
An all-new UnrealEngine.com has come online. The new website places the community and learning materials more at the center of it all:
Documentation, Forums, and Learning Library are part of the upper nav and directly accessible
Embedded Forum sections on some pages
Embedded links to Epic Dev Community tutorials and other such posts on various pages
The site links to dozens of specific Documentation pages throughout
While not yet live today, very soon you will start to see noteworthy forum posts being highlighted within the UnrealEngine.com newsfeed in order to give more visibility to the best discussions, or the coolest new pieces of work.
The left nav bar of the Epic Developer Community has undergone some changes and has seen its content become context dependent. This provides more relevant shortcuts to forum categories, sub-sections of the learning library, and the documentation table of contents.
The upper nav bar on the Epic Developer Community now matches the ones from UnrealEngine.com, Fortnite.com, and other Epic sites.
The Epic Developer Community has transitioned over to the overall Epic design language in order to provide a coherent experience no matter which Epic website you engage with. Many Epic sites are transitioning over to this unified design.
Unreal Engine Documentation has migrated into the Epic Dev Community
Unreal Engine 5.x documentation has been moved into the Epic Developer community, in order to fully unify all information into the same place.
Our aim is to increase topic coverage and depth across the learning and documentation materials available: All content can now be searched through via a single Search, in the future it will pave the way to have documentation and tutorial content be better integrated with one another, as well as allowing the different but related sets of documentation to come closer together, for example UEFN and UE. Plus we are working towards being able to have community contributions for documentation in the future.
A special note about Search Engines and our documentation pages: In particular, Unreal Engine users will have noticed at times a search engine directed you to an older version of a documentation page. We have taken a different approach there now to try and prevent this from happening going forward. We do think it will take further work after today still, so consider it a work in progress, but we are on it.
We’ve updated the profiles. The new layout was designed to make it easier to show off your contributions to the community
As part of this, we’ve also clarified the meaning of the badges. Note: Going forward the badge system overall still needs more automation to ensure that badges get distributed automatically and at the right time. This is something we will be working on.
We have added the ability to select one of your badges as your primary badge.
The new editor provides a WYSIWYG experience that will make authoring tutorials easier, alongside a number of new components such as Tables, and Call Outs such as warnings or notes.
It is noteworthy that the new tutorial editor is also the same tool we will be using internally to write all documentation in the future, bringing all forms of learning content creation into one tool and format.
Note: Tutorials made before today will continue to open in Tutorial Editor 1.0 for the time being, please be aware if you edit any of those. In the future we will be working on a plan to migrate everything over.
We’ve phased out the forum Knowledge Base plugin and instead integrated Knowledge Base posts into the Learning Library. With KBs being present within the learning library it brings all forms of content into the same format and place.
In the future, we will be opening up KBs to everyone, so that anyone can contribute KBs to the library. Plus we will be extending KBs to more of our tools and services beyond just Unreal Engine and Twinmotion.
Next month you will be seeing the next wave of updates:
We are working on extending the Developer Portal that is currently used for Epic Online Services and Epic Games Store to also support Unreal Engine, Twinmotion, and RealityCapture.
We will also be introducing Team Profiles to the Epic Developer Community. Using the Developer Portal you will be able to set up and manage your team, which will then show up on the Epic Developer Community alongside all existing profiles.
However, whenever I try to access the forum preferences my browser starts a DoS-attack :-/ It runs forever until chrome asks me to kill the tab. I get HTTP 429 errors after some time. Cleared cache and logged out/in didn’t solve the issue.
We cannot reproduce the forum preference one, does it still occur for you? There is maybe a chance that you did this just at the time while we were making changes on on our, and it somehow caused this.
Noted on the spacing on mobile, agreed that there is wasted space there. We will look at it.
@Kamyker yup with all the changes that happened some things may be cached and may a hard refresh.
@im_a_lama - Yeah I also noticed that the other day, we have it on a list and will get it fixed.
For everyone’s vis known issues we are working on:
The categories in the left nav while in the forum can at times default back to Unreal Engine even if you were in a non UE space. This happens in particular when non logged in
Search on docs/tutorials/snippets does not let you look past page 1 right now
Search is surfacing API documentation pages above other results, creating a lot of noise.
I find the new forum layout very hard to read - is there a way to switch back to the older formatting?
Edit: After using it more I’ve isolated it to just needing more demarcation between the forum topics - a slightly larger gap and the title in a different color would work.
don’t know if this is a known problem, but UK2Node only shows UObjectBase in its inheritance hierarchy even though it is a child of UEdGraphNode. I haven’t looked at too many others but it seems a couple of other classes only list UObjectBase in their inheritance hierarchy in the new documentation.
Please format the Python API documentation. Current formatting makes it difficult to find and understand information. Also please include a search functionality for the python API, like there was previously.
but I also confirm that the “main navigation” table of contents menu on the left seems to be gone when in desktop mode, on mobile it does shows up… those things happen, take ur time… the changes are great so far…
I have no complaints about the aesthetic revamp, but the API documentation is nearly unusable in some respects now - the Inheritance Hierarchy sections seem to only show the top-level class (making it pointless), and the listings for class member variables are totally broken:
Variable names are no longer links to subpages with easily-readable information about each variable
Variable type names are cut off past a certain length of characters… which would be fine if you could click on the variable (see above) and be able to view what the full variable type is, but you can’t do that anymore
These are big issues. My current workaround to see what the full types of member variables are is to manually write the URL to each variable’s subpage and visit it that way, which takes forever. Fortunately, I don’t need to check the inheritance hierarchy of any classes right now, but if I did I’d either look at an archive of the docs or dig through the engine source code (ouch).
I’ve attached a screenshot which partially illustrates these problems. Please fix these issues soon! The API docs were fairly reliable/useful before.
On desktop, I am overall happy with the redesign. I like cleaner flat look with less wonky gradients. The performance also seems quite a bit better. What is disappointing is that entering any forum section still overloads users with too much visual noise they need to parse.
Some time ago, I made a mockup how forum subsection layout could be cleaned up a bit to reduce visual noise:
Current (before redesign):
I guess the main readability issue is that the thread titles are preceded by badges, instead of badges being on their own row. This makes it difficult to just scan the text content in the way people are used to scan/glance at large amount of text.
The proposed changes done were:
Removed duplicate breadcrumb links. I don’t get why they are there twice.
Moved the forum buttons from the top banner under Forum section of the sidebar.
Moved knowledge base link above the snippets (they are related).
Reduced the saturation of the eye burning cyan accent color.
Replaced the distracting background image with solid color.
Removed the pinned post spam (Could be just reduced, some pinned post are ancient.)
Removed the post text previews under the post titles. They are just too much visual information to parse.
Increased space between post titles and tags.
Moved forum section badges from post title row to the start of the tag row.
Recovered wasted vertical space.
Some of these were already addressed in the new redesign, and I am grateful for that, however it could use a few more steps to get back to cleaner mainstream discourse experience.
The root section directory is visually nice and clean:
thanks for that!
