UE4 Users Wishlist

Hello dear Epic,

We know you have a priority list for implementing features in UE4, and less important features can wait.
On the other hand the UE4 community also has their own priority list.
Sometimes what is “less important” for you, is the “most important” for the community.
This thread aims to gather enough attention and let you know what features affect our projects/products more.

Please post your requests here. Frequently requested features will be added to Trello.

Thanks!

Since there’s apparently a thread dedicated to listing this all in one place, may as well add this to the list. With how hard Epic has been pushing Blueprints since the release of the engine, it seems kind of silly that Steam integration both in terms of documentation and in terms of actual functionality is unfortunately lacking. The Steam Blueprint tutorial series seems to be cursed with all the delays it’s had, while basic functionality like a proper server browser that has a working ping indicator, map name, etc needs the Advanced Sessions plugin to work correctly. I understand that not every project is relying solely on Blueprints, but with the audience Epic has been trying to attract by pushing it so hard, things like this are going to hold a lot of newcomers to the engine that don’t know C++ back.

Something as critical to a game’s functionality as basic multiplayer support would ideally not be reliant on a free plugin that may or may not be updated a year or two in the future.

Edit:
Also, of course there’s the push to get origin shifting support in multiplayer as well as the currently supported singleplayer. It’s been in the backlog for over a year now, and it would be nice to see that particular bottleneck in the engine gone.

Ha!
Not really.
I understand why you want the aforementioned, but please dont claim you are speaking for us all.
they are great suggestions/requests, but to claim as if we all want and need it… rubs me wrong.

By doing a simple search you can find something about 10,000 posts regarding Dynamic G.I. On the same threads you can see about +600,000 views in total. That means that many people are interested in Dynamic G.I. Me mentioning “The UE4 Community needs Dynamic G.I” is one voice representing the others. Same goes with AA and Tessellation. True, there are people like you that do not need these features at all. It was my mistake to use the “whole” in my sentence. I should have used “majority” instead. Fixed!

Voting is a cool thing but sadly i think this wont reflect how many people really want Dynamic GI in UE4… Your vote has the premise that all interested usrers notice and read this thread.
Like Maximum-Dev wrote, i think the the posts / thredas speak for them self, there is definelty a huge interest in dynmaic GI.

Absolutely correct. We’re not going to get as many votes as the posts throughout all the related threads on these forums. There are lots of threads and posts regarding those issues and Epic could already address those issues if they wanted to. But lets assume the engine developers don’t have the time to browse through all the threads and sub-forums to find out what’s going on. I think focusing all the attention on one thread helps them see these serious issues clearer. I have already posted the link to this thread on two UE4 Facebook groups and I encourage you and everybody else to keep spreading the link so more people can post their requests/sign the petitions. Still the voting may fail because we can’t let everybody know this thread exists so I will link other threads in the OP and use those as a secondary reason to show how important those features are.

Thank you Adik! :slight_smile:

I have a better idea… lets print all the forum post and threats about dynmaic GI and send them in a huuuuuge container to Mr Sweeney. Maybe we will get some attention ? :confused::cool::stuck_out_tongue:

The issue is that for example the VXGI thread has Replies: 3,292 Views: 428,572. AHR thread has Replies: 1,233 Views: 170,750. (There are also DFGI and a lot other threads about Dynamic G.I) that means thousands of UE4 users are looking for Dynamic G.I in UE4 to improve their projects/products and all they are getting is unofficial and buggy solutions that may or may not have a future. Then if you look at the UE4 Roadmap->Rendering tab, G.I is the second most requested feature after Forward Shading, but both are backlogged and not even prioritized for next 6 months or next year. Why is that? Epic? :confused:

At the point where the most important features for community are the least important features for the developer it gives the impression that the developer does not value the community. But I don’t like to look at it that way. It might just simply need a little more attention from the community side in order for the developer to see it better and take it more seriously. :slight_smile:

Actually i dont think they dont value the community, i think the develoment of UE4 is driven by their own games and needs. Dynmaic GI “lighitng in general” is very very complex “monster” and it will take some time and resources to develope it. However i think epic is busy with developing tools and features they need for games like paragon and other releases and as long they don’t need dynamic GI we wont get it sadly.
I mean remember how long people wanted to have good cloth, skin and Hair shaders ? Nothing hapend until epic needed it for Paragon…

By the way… I’m hopping im absolutley wrong here with my opinion…

Most of the new features come from individuals and from epic themselves…
The better question instead of “it gives the impression that the developer does not value the community.” why not ask what epic is actively doing to encourage actual game companies to create pull requests for new features, instead of hogging em.

Also, guess you forgot all the free stuff epic has been giving us when you said they dont value the community.
Or don’t know there is a community spotlight.

But actually M-Dev is right… look at all the topics and threads about dynamic GI… have a look at the trelloboard… I mean it’s obvious that they are not respecting the wish of this community to get dynamic GI, for what reason ever…
I’m sure he means they dont value the wishes, not like they give a S… about us… :wink:

Just forgot to mention… two nice features would be…

  1. Volumetric lighting
  2. Volumetric fog

I don’t mean to be rude y saying “it gives the impression that the developer does not value the community”. I appreciate all the work.
But if you make a Roadmap and let the public vote for features they need and then you do exactly the opposite of what they have voted for, it’s hard to feel good. It’s not about G.I, I hope you understand. It’s about making both sides happy. Developers who spend about 14 hours a day at PC working on a UE4 project care more about the feature list and the problems that need fixing, and care less about the free packs/spotlights (but it’s appreciated). I think that’s enough off-topics here. Let’s get your requests coming and get back to the point of this thread.

My request would be, in addition to the already mentioned one.

  1. Volumetric lighting
  2. Volumetric fog

They are both scheduled to do on July. Hopefully we’ll have those soon. :slight_smile:

Why concerned about dynamic gi?
I get, it is cool and in perspective easy to plug in solution for beautiful and cheap (production cost) levels, but it will be accessible for average customer in not that near of the future, when right now, engine miss dozen of things on every level, from very beginning for blueprints and high end for source documentation.

I think games like Kigdom Come, The FarCry games, the Division and many more are very average and they are using some kind of real time GI even if the GI is captured in a lightprobe. So Real Time GI or at least something near Real Time is not witch craft.
The games i mentioned are record holder in sales, so they are pretty average to me if is buying them. I got your point that not has a Geforce 780 Ti or a 1080 but its not like the average user is sticking to Pentium 200MMX Cpu’s and Vodo 3dfx Cards …

Ouh boy thats music in my ears…

It’s rather upsetting that it seems that way with how they’ve been ignoring the topic entirely for so long. Dynamic GI has been the most popular topic even before the UE4 was released and still in beta, and the closest thing we’ve gotten to it, DFGI, has been abandoned for over a year now and doesn’t function anymore.

It’s not only Paragon, but now it’s looking like we might be waiting another 1-2 years for Epic to finish with the whole VR thing before they’ll even consider it again. They’re not about to add a performance heavy lighting system when they’re targeting stereoscopic 90 fps.

In all honesty though, I don’t think they’re going out of their way to ignore us, but it’s like you said, they’re only really concerned about adding features that they’ll be able to use in their own games. A lot of the driving force behind the engine updates seem to just be whatever it is that their current project requires.

OP updated.

It’s sad that we haven’t hear one word from epic staff so far… Would be really nice to hear one or two words from them about this request thread.

Hey, I wanted to address some of the concerns about these feature requests and dynamic GI specifically.

A while back, UE4 did have a SVOGI feature that was later removed due to its expense, bugs and resource drain from other features. Although it is not currently being actively developed by Epic’s developers, we’re always happy to look into PRs from GitHub that may offer solutions. We are hearing you here, however! As you have more feedback about what you’d like to see regarding global illumination,let us know here.

It’s important to us to gauge where to prioritize effort using the community’s voice and actions as a guide, so if there are any questions or concerns, please feel free to direct them to this forum or myself directly so they’re on our radar.

In response to the other requests:

2. Tessellation “initial cost” is too high - This is already confirmed to be out of backlog and getting fixed for 4.13. But it will stay here as a reminder

Sounds like you know the status here, so that’s all good.

3. Support for latest and greatest anti-aliasing modes

MSAA is in the pipeline for forward rendering and we will continue to improve on TAA over time.

4. Expose all of Steamworks to Blueprint

Though we aren’t exposing Steamworks directly, we’re giving access to common interfaces through implementation.

5. Forward Shading Support

This was brought up recently because of an Oculus-created forward rendering on desktop plugin. You can find the current implementation of it on this thread, but we do have plans to add forward rendering in the future. Stay tuned :wink:

In general, having more than one request / topic of feedback in a single thread often proves to be much more difficult for us to parse due to multiple conversations going on simultaneously in the same space. These should stand up on their own and deserve their own independent conversations so we can get a better idea of the asks for each. The threads that have been linked to specific discussions have been commented on as well, as it’s helpful for us to continue conversations where they begin.