Important Features Request

General Feedback & Requests
1

Hello Epic Games,

I’m planning to writing you for a long time and now I decided to write you about some important features.

Unreal Engine 4 is my favourite game engine and also I loved UDK 3, but UE4 is best month by month.
But, there are some features that are missing and I said “I will wait…” again, again and again.
But, I can’t wait any more and I feel that now is time to asking these features, until is not too late.
Since these features are very important to me, I want to share with you my ideas and I want to request you
to make these features because without these features, I can’t make a great game.
Also, Steam platform wants me to make a great AAA game and I want it too, but there is no synchronization
between Steam and UE4. So, next I will list all my wishes that I want to see in UE4 next time.

1. Please add in animations “Opacity” feature for Canvas Panels.
Why? I want to make more easy an menu for my game and I want to add more canvas panels and every panel will
include more menus, such as: main menu, options and about. But, when I want to make an transition between
one to another one canvas panel I want to apply one fade in and fade out effect by opacity feature and now
this is impossible, so I’m forced to create a lot of Widget Blueprints for each frame or section from menu.

2. Please add “Soft shadow” for the texts from Widget Blueprints.
Why? I need this soft shadow for the texts because I can’t manage to make the text in a good visibility on
every situation from the game because of lighting from 3D space and the text cannot be seen or recognized.
If I add a shadow, this actual shadow from Widget Blueprint is not soft and doesn’t look nice.
I noticed about “Background Blur” under “Special Effects” from Widget Blueprints and I think if you did this
effect you can also make this for the text shadow.

3. Please add “3D Perspective” special canvas panel to make some UI in perspective and also to animate the
perspective like flip card like in CSS3 from HTML5.
Why? I can do some tricks to make this, but it requires a lot of time and is not a easy way to make it
happen and also this affects the FPS rate.

4. Please improve the reflections from metallic material surface.
Why? When I look up or down or another angle, that depends of the mesh, the reflection is not stable.
I noticed this issue a lot of time and I’m sure is not just me, since this can be noticed also on YouTube
in a lot of videos.

*And the last one that doesn’t matter, but it’s a feature that makes the life with UE4 more easy. *

5. Please add “Categories” on Library -> Vault from Epic Games Launcher.
Why? When I want to take a look for a bought item from UE4 Marketplace, easily I’m lost in a lot of items.
So, If I select from the category: blueprints, materials or code plug-ins, this will help me to find the
desired item, more easy.

**Thank you for reading my requests and I hope to get a positive answer from you, Epic Games. **

2

  1. Might add it in the future, but I’m really not interested in adding it to just Canvas. I’m more interested in adding Opacity to the base SWidget so that all widgets can be easily have their opacity animated. You can always make this mod yourself, or modify canvas to suit your needs. AAA games mod the engine all the time :slight_smile:

  2. Soft shadows require a complete rethink to the the font atlas and how we render text. And rendering text right, and well is probably about the hardest thing to do in UI…so I wouldn’t plan it being done soon. The technology and approach we use for the blurring in no way overlaps with how you have to do soft shadows on text.

  3. Doing 3D perspective on the UI has many requirements and prerequisites. Step 1 is what I’m working on now - completely redoing the way Slate does clipping. It’s a gigantic change and is going to break backwards compatibility. Step 2…N, involves figuring out how best to do it, I built a prototype on top of my clipping changes, and there’s a lot to doing it right. Hit testing, anti-aliasing, simplifying render transforms. It also causes a lot of poor text rendering since there’s only 1 glyph being rendered at different depths when at angles. My prototype solves none of those problems.

3
  1. The reflections you’re describing are Screen Space Reflections (SSR), and as the name denotes, can only reflect what is visible on the screen. SSR should not be used solely by itself and you should make use of Reflection Captures to blend these areas or you can use the Planar Reflection actor for more dynamic reflections.

You can read about these in the following documentation pages:

4

Surely I was planning to ask for the number 5. Here seems a midnight find in the Vault items bought in marketplace. I have to scrolling the page for a long time to find something.

‘Vault from Epic Games Launcher’, Could be separated by categories like the Marketplace page. For example, blueprints go to the blueprints section, animations to the animations, effects to the effects, plugins …
And just above vault section, hotlinks or honeycomb, for quick access to the various sections.

5

[MENTION=2522]Nick Darnell[/MENTION], I think the most important feature is soft shadows, the rest of features are, maybe, a science fiction domain. But, please, give a try to text with soft shadows.
[MENTION=4894]Tim Hobson[/MENTION], Thank you for the references.
@lunyBunny, I think this feature is not so hard to be implemented. So, We will see it soon. :smiley: