I love the engine but why is it so bare bones?

Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love UE4 and I’m so thankful to Epic for creating and releasing it. I am curious though about the choice to leave so many features that could use out of the engine. I’m talking about features like a proper menu system with the ability to adjust graphic settings, remap key bindings, adjust sound levels etc. Or a save game system, or a basic multiplayer system. I realize that some of these features are available on the marketplace - I even purchased one of the menu systems. My complaint is that these are core features that could benefit from having, and by leaving even base systems like these up to the community to create and sell via the Marketplace it puts a lot of people behind a giant paywall when they’re simply trying to get some base functionality to work with. It’s fantastic that Epic has provided some core gameplay kits that you can use as a great starting point for your project (like the Blueprint FPS, Third Person, Driving etc.) but it would be so much more beneficial for - especially for indies with extremely limited funds - if Epic were to implement some of these systems into the engine officially. I mean, it’s great that some of the team members are creating tutorials on how we can implement these systems ourselves like the Multiplayer tutorial series by or even his Inventory and UI system. Also every tutorial that makes. But seriously, should every person who wants to make a multiplayer game have to go through twenty three 10 - 30 minute tutorials just to get some basic multiplayer systems implemented?

I also think the idea of putting so much of the engine functionality up on the marketplace really discourages the community from helping each other out by providing free tutorials because so many people want (and need) to make some money for their efforts. I’m used to the mod scene where helps each other out for free to promote growth and ultimately strengthen the community as a whole. Again, please don’t see this as me bashing the system, I’m simply trying to start a friendly discussion on the subject. I understand the purpose behind the marketplace and I realize that overall it’s a great way for to win. I’ve purchased literally hundreds of dollars of content from the marketplace for my projects and I’m completely happy with every purchase that I’ve made. I’m just personally a little frustrated with how many features - that I would imagine to be core engine functionality that would use - are left out of the engine.

To be fair, it sounds more like game features rather than engine features.

Until the day, when we can upload data directly into our brains, yep, we would have to stick to conventional means of education, sadly.

I strongly disagree. More helpful community than UE4’s yet remains to be seen. The help you will get is directly proportional to your own efforts though.

Yet again, the scope of “everyone would use” should be defined.

For menus I couldn’t wish for anything better than UMG tbh. There are examples for menus, multiplayer etc. Already by Epic. The reason they’re so “barebones” is because every game will want its implantation to be different in some way, meaning the best Epic can do for us is lay down the foundations, which is what they did. Btw you can already set and save gfx settings and make savegames in blueprints. And these require basic blueprint knowledge to implement. And if you can’t do that then that’ll be a big problem later down the line because there is no “make game” button.

tbh i agree with TorQueMod, i said it way back when the marketplace opened, one side is some of the demo’s are to basic - the other side is that Epic didn’t release a near full game ala UDK as an example of best prinicples

on a personal note i stopped doing tutorials due to other people copying my free work, and others getting paid for passing that info on

its a hard balance and i think they have lost the way

The number of tutorials I found on Youtube that are essentially just restating stuff from the official Epic Youtube channel is ridiculous.

Obviously not and that’s not something I’m requesting. And yes UMG is fantastic. What I’m asking for is a basic framework with the core functionality already implemented where we can then edit the system with UMG to customize it to our own liking. Seriously, the fact that each and every project is going to need a menu system and they all have to implement it from scratch is just goofy. Sure you’ll want to customize the look but the core functionality is the same for every game. And again that’s only one of the core systems that the engine is missing. Actually Water is another system that I see as mind blowing that Epic hasn’t implemented officially. And I am aware of the water materials that made available to for free via the Learn tab but they’re only visual. Where’s the functionality for swimming. When you look at the default movement code, swimming is one of the modes and yet it’s not implemented.

There a too many people who think “My game needs this” always think “an engine needs this”.
Implementing functionality “hardcoded” into the engine means that every game will have this functionality, no matter if it needs it or not.

A “bare bones” Engine has more possibilities, since you have more freedom what you want to do.

He’s got a point concenrning menu system, though.

You could just import/export from one project to another and re-word it for the correct context?

I had the same thing with allot of my maya 3d tutorials and models that I gave away for free, I still see them up on places like turbosquid for 50 bucks a peice and it ****** me off. I am tired of requesting they are taken down tbh. My guides (which were mainly aimed at QER/Cod4) were copied word for word and even the pictures I put up and passed off as others. I’ve written it off as a bad experience and really can’t be bothered any more.

A bit more on topic, I think there could be a bit more in base tutorials, as Geo said with udk they gave a functioning few levels and it was quite easy to back track from there. But menu systems/keymaps ect I don’t think is a deal breaker, at least for me.

Epic will implement everything that has a high demand. How much percent of the games released last year had a proper implementation of water? Ofc course they won’t drop the huge amount of VR work, because someone asks for a water implementation. Also there is a huge community project about water, so why would they spent time on that ¯_(ツ)_/¯. Also, what if you made something that is not a game, maybe something stupid for mobile, so you want your menu to only have a Play Button or Interact Button? About Sound Volume: Every game has different sound classes, what if you had an arcade game where you only have Music and Effect Volumes and no character voice etc.? Then you still need to manually adjust things. Graphics Settings: What if your game is for console and you don’t have much Scalability? What if your game only needs the Spacebar and WASD to play, then you don’t want a key remapping in your game. I think it’s the right decision to have the bare bones of the menu system.

An options menu has the issue where every game will have different requirements for what settings to change so’s going to have to do some work to set that up anyway.

Framework != engine.
Epic can’t build frameworks or starter kits for everybody obviously.

Someone mention about Epic implementing only features that are on high demand. I fully agree as resource is scarce - you cannot do everything. And plus where Epic is likely to implement in its own games - because, Epic will be fully responsible to support the features. It is kinda hard to support and implement features which you yourself are not using. Do nothng or implement something very good - this will always be win.

And also, I agree with the notion that do not think along the line “Oh I need this feature badly, this must be important why it is not implemented in UE4. So UE4 is kinda crippled”. It is just too hand-holding to me, and Epic is not creating your game. There are certain lines where you have to implement yourself.

I think Unreal Engine has great menu systems, save game systems, and networking systems.
It doesn’t have the specific GUI for those systems; that’s left for you to fill in.
I also think Unreal Engine has great character animation systems, but doesn’t contain actual character meshes/animations, because those are also for you to fill in.

If you think your game would be fine with the blue (or white?) default Unreal mannequin, then perhaps there could also be various GUI screens for the things you mention, that would be as useful to a final game as the blue mannequin is – that is, not very.
Would the engine really be any better if that content was included? Do you use the included orange chairs in your game, too?

While I agree with this I feel as though the Marketplace promotes competition between developers and not an open sharing nature such as Epic with UE4 being open source. There is nothing stopping the community from getting together to help Epic to provide better framework support and infact if there is any one group that has a wide range of requirements which could be used to develop light weight modular frameworks its the UE4 community.

I get where the OP is coming from and I start from scratch alot of the time because Epics templates are not really fleshed out enough for me to bother, I end up replacing most of their functionality and in regards to the marketplace content there are some nice packs but some are similar in that they arnt very fleshed out or modular.

Anyways to get onto the topic of the engine being barebones, I feel as though that partly has to do with the lack of modularity in core systems such as they Asset Editors, it makes it difficult for people to expand on the editor in particular and most of what we see in plugins is small bits of additional functionality rather than something substantial which goes deep into the engine.

Personally I feel as though the community could have the biggest impact and that if we could work together we could alleviate alot of these issues ourselves by pooling time and reducing wheel reinvention not just for us but also at Epic on the engine freeing people up to work on more substantial engine/framework systems :cool:

I don’t understand this argument, really;
How do you think we got from 4.0.0 up to 4.15.x so fast?!

We have a super community with hundreds of people contributing solutions and fixes every month over GitHub, I have never seen any game engine anywhere this collaborative with the community!
I don’t see people sharing like this since the early XNA heydays…

so long as the market place exist this won’t happen

i’ve only bought 1 item from the market place and sometimes i regret even that, because the complete lack of doc’s, and it realise on its user group for support !!!

other content i have been shown turned out to be complete bodge jobs which would have been a complete waste of money on my side if i had bought it. btw these things where standard in udk !!!

UDK is/was closed source.
You do understand it has third-party middleware that have to be removed from UE4, right?
Epic cannot share the source code of a lot of the things in there, so I guess they’ve just decided to remove many of the “standard” stuff you took for granted on UDK.

Yeah I get lots of hate as soon as I bring up the topic of helping Epic for free because of a few reasons, people want ownership of their code whatever that means, people dont want to be giving Epic something for free probably because they feel like their time is worth something and maybe because they want to keep the source to themselves for a competitive advantage. All reasons I actually understand in part but there have been projects where people have come together and collaborated to make them better, Epic charge actually a rather minimal royalty fee in the scheme of what they provide.

I have said before that I would have gladly been paying the subscription all these years, one of the prime reasons behind that is to keep the people who want something for nothing all the time out, another reason is that I feel it could improve the support end with new features, engine bug/QA etc.

We could be working together instead of arguing about it thats basically where Im at, theres lots of people here with skills and talents that go to waste debating semantics instead of being productive and making the engine/frameworks better for. The UE4 catch phrase is on the money, “When you succeed, we succeed!” (or some iteration of that) as UE4 developers building the community as a whole whether its indie dev studios, hobbyists, AAA… Anyone using the engine can benefit and those benefits can trickle down to and anyone can contribute to that cause. I dont like that with everything Epic has done for the community they are lumped in with big corporations that are publicly traded on the stock market, I really dont feel Epic have evil ulterior motives, that theres something hidden in the EULA so they can steal my livelyhood or some other tinfoil hat conspiracy.