UE4 Roadmap

Update: We’ve made some changes to the Unreal Engine roadmap. Read all about it here

Today we’ve made our engine roadmap public for to see. guide represents where our team is spending energy on specific Unreal Engine 4 features to give you a better sense of what’s happening here at Epic.

Our hope with being more transparent in our development processes is that we’ll generate more value for developers working with UE4, both in understanding what’s likely to appear in upcoming releases and also in having more context around how the engine is being built (and a little bit of the why).

As a disclaimer, anything listed in the current version may not actually make it into the engine as planned today; we may run into complications that push out a , or we may have reason to stop working on it altogether. Items in our backlog may never see the light of day either, as they are simply ideas we’ve discussed but haven’t yet figured out if or how they would best fit into the engine. While we intend for most items on the roadmap to end up surfacing as estimated, we want to make it clear that there is no guarantee of a being added to the engine even if it’s currently listed.

That being said, there are many upgrades and fixes going into the engine which are not represented here. We shipped 100+ improvements in the 4.1 update a month after UE4’s launch, so the engine is rapidly and continually evolving. What we’re sharing is a high-level view of how we are extending UE4 at very moment and what we plan to do next.

We’re taking a flexible and lightweight approach with the roadmap given that priorities often change and there are unpredictable opportunities that arise on a regular basis. The sweet spot for us seems to be around 3-4 months of planning at any given time, with a few longer term efforts that gently break that rule (our parallel rendering efforts are a good example of that today). As such you’ll see the most detail and confidence on the roadmap for tasks in the next 1-2 months. Entries further down the timeline become representations of our intent today and will likely shift as we finish each month.

We intentionally focus on defining the bigger work for our roadmap and leave the details of bug fixing and smaller tasks in our bug tracking software. The engine is quite large these days which means there’s always a tremendous amount being developed, and it can be challenging to meaningfully communicate that work to a broad audience. Our roadmap serves to share the mid-to-high level development efforts in a way that is easy to digest and provides context, especially for those not directly working on a particular area. Trello helps us with approach given that it’s great for sharing the breadth of a project, and if you try to insert too much detail it quickly bogs down.

is one step of many we plan to take to build full transparency around our development process. It’s important to us that we’re building what developers want and need to ship their own successful projects, and steps like these will facilitate a better ongoing conversation about what that ends up being.

is an experiment for us and as such it’s important that we get your feedback on what we’re doing – vote on features you’re excited about, send us comments on things that seem confusing or unclear, and better yet let us know what you think should be on the roadmap that isn’t already.

Thank you for helping us build a better UE4!

Thanks for . At the moment, Epic and UE4 is a pure joy for indie game developers. Hope you can keep it up :slight_smile:

Thanks, i love Unreal Engine 4 and his developers! :slight_smile:
Unreal Engine 4 - best support, best technology, best of the best for indie game developers!

is simply great, thank you very much!!

is an move, exemplary!

Yay! Trello!

Also trello is another good way of getting or encouraging feeback. We can “vote” on new features. Which can help shift priorities if needed.

Good job guys! is why i am picking UE4 over unity/CE3!

Yet another epic move from Epic. :slight_smile:

Nice, is to see. Lots of stuff planned for the rendering department :slight_smile:

is great news! Thanks for the insight.

Did you deactivate commenting on purpose?

Very nice and impressive list! i’m just getting familiar with blueprints and had an idea that being able to write math expressions into the nodes would be useful and I’m very glad to find it on the list :). I actually would like if blueprints turned into a visual/normal script hybrids where we can write in simple expressions, be it pseudo code, js or python. (besides the planned math expressions we could use it for conditionals, loops etc)

[=mzprox;28527]
I actually would like if blueprints turned into a visual/normal script hybrids where we can write in simple expressions, be it pseudo code, js or python. (besides the planned math expressions we could use it for conditionals, loops etc)

Yes. Math nodes will be great. It will be nice to have a single node for an expression that requires a long line of nodes currently.

But I don’t see the benefit of script nodes to be honest. Quite the contrary, if you could have script nodes, the flow of your graph becomes much harder to “read”. Math nodes will just get rid of some of the unnecessarily long chains of operations, but not change the nodes that execute things.

By the way, has been discussed previously:

[=;]
is great news! Thanks for the insight.

Did you deactivate commenting on purpose?

We thought to keep feedback here in the forums at first, although if there’s a lot of interest in commenting directly in Trello cards then we’re open to the idea.

[=;28535]
Yes. Math nodes will be great. It will be nice to have a single node for an expression that requires a long line of nodes currently.

But I don’t see the benefit of script nodes to be honest. Quite the contrary, if you could have script nodes, the flow of your graph becomes much harder to “read”. Math nodes will just get rid of some of the unnecessarily long chains of operations, but not change the nodes that execute things.

By the way, has been discusser previously:

From a development point of view you’re generally better off picking one or the other - embedding code inside a visual scripting system can be useful in a pinch but has some trade-offs as you continue to build your project. That being said seems like a great community project if one wanted to start a fork on . :slight_smile:

[=Ray ;28537]
We thought to keep feedback here in the forums at first, although if there’s a lot of interest in commenting directly in Trello cards then we’re open to the idea.

I personally think simple Nay or Yay voting would be better. Best with publicly knowing who is voting. So less trolling (;.

[=Ray ;28537]
We thought to keep feedback here in the forums at first, although if there’s a lot of interest in commenting directly in Trello cards then we’re open to the idea.

I just thought it would be a more direct way of commenting some of the topics. I wouldn’t want to open an entire thread for these things. But I would also understand if you didn’t want an additional channel to monitor and moderate.

[=;28540]
I personally think simple Nay or Yay voting would be better. Best with publicly knowing who is voting. So less trolling (;.

That’s how it is now. I already voted on my favorites. Linux Editor and Physics improvements, yay :slight_smile:

It just keeps getting better and better!! :slight_smile:
Thanks Epic!

RE: commenting. Not allowing public commenting provides us with the ability to provide updates on progress via comments… or at least leaves us with the option to do so. We can always re-evaluate but didn’t want to shut that door.

[=;28571]
RE: commenting. Not allowing public commenting provides us with the ability to provide updates on progress via comments… or at least leaves us with the option to do so. We can always re-evaluate but didn’t want to shut that door.

Good call, perhaps you could link a forum post in the trello cards, and keep the trello comments to just updates?

Good move, I like Trello a lot, nice tool to use and very useful to share a roadmap!

Couple of things on my wishlist:

-Materials that can emit light used by lightmass (think neon letters). Right now the emissive only works as a screen effect and doesn’t really emit light into the environment. was a great of UE3 that’s not in UE4.
-I’d really like to see real time, I couldn’t see that as an item and was disappointed that it’s not even on the roadmap (even if current machines can’t handle it properly), give that it was supposed to be one of the features of UE4.