100 Days into the Epic Developer Community

[Hourences]

Hi everyone,

FIrst, we’d like to say thanks for continuing to share your knowledge on the Epic Developer Community (EDC)! All of your support has helped us hit major milestones in our first 107 days—more than 100,000 people have created a profile on the EDC, we’ve seen 500+ community tutorials posted, and there are now over 1,000 tutorials and courses in the learning library, made by both Epic and community contributors. Additionally, we’ve nearly reached 500 snippets, and seen over 2,500 solutions on the Q&A pages.

Activity on the forum appears several magnitudes greater than prior to the launch of Unreal Engine 5 and the EDC. It is heartwarming to see your enthusiasm and the support you provide one another.

Since our last site update, we’ve been working on a whole lot of changes and improvements to further build out the community experience.

As mentioned when we launched this site back in early April, the community is something that is close to our hearts and we will continue to invest in it. The site remains actively under development, and throughout the rest of 2022 you’ll see that through various changes, tweaks, and new features that will be popping up as time goes by.

With the EDC’s 3-month birthday , I wanted to give you all an update on what we’ve been working on. Some of these changes are already live, while others are expected to be live in the near future.

---

Search

We’ve made all kinds of search improvements

• Thumbnails are shown on certain results, and the author of a post, the date, and other metadata are now also included.
• Additional filters were added
• Support for exact match has been added
• The weighing of the results have been tweaked. This may need additional tweaking in the future.

---

Heroes and Badges

• We have launched an initial version of the Heroes page with highlights for our Community Heroes and descriptions of our latest specialty badges.
• New badges to recognize your activity on the EDC are now earnable, such as First Snippet or Tutorial Professor (you earn that when you make a lot of tutorials )
• Behind the scenes, we’re working to automate these badges, and bring in even more to identify your activity across the ecosystem, such as Epic MegaGrant recipients, Authorized Trainers, and more.
• Note that these programs are still a work in progress, and we’re working to retroactively assign the new badges as we can.

---

Localization

• Localization options for the overall site and forums are set to go live this summer, with support for Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French.
• Support for these additional languages has also been added to learning posts, and we’ve begun translating or migrating existing translations for courses over.
  Priority is given to UE5 courses and key tutorials. Localized versions will be added as they’re completed, and most of the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean courses are already available.

---

Nav Bars/Menus

• The links to the Inside Unreal, Unreal Indies, and Community Heroes pages have been moved from the left menu to the top nav bar, so that the left menu becomes more focused.
• We removed the ability to collapse sections of the left-hand menu since we felt there were too few options to continue to have that in.
• Instead, we added in the ability to collapse the entire left-hand menu in a way that resembles the UE5 editor.

---

View Counts

There were two errors in the tutorial/snippet view tracking that we found. We’ve fixed these during the last 2 weeks, and it has caused the reported view counts to go up dramatically. If you have contributed tutorials to the site, it may explain seeing a sudden increase in the views on your content going forward (will unfortunately not work retroactively).

---

Design Updates

• We are iterating the design in various places. This is most noticeable on the learning pages where the header has changed.
• We removed some color coding (for example, community tutorials being yellow, while Epic content is blue), because we are going to use colors to distinguish between unique tools in the future.

---

SEO

• We’re working to improve search engine optimization. The goal is to ensure that you can Google for whatever topic you wish, and be able to find that easily back on the EDC.
  • We seem to be doing pretty well with search ranking, but if you notice any issues please let us know.
• Some work left to be done - Server Side Rendering is the major missing piece we are still tackling. Also video transcripts need further work to be readable by bots.

---

New Player

• The learning pages are being upgraded to a new video player, which also includes embedded, searchable transcripts.
• We anticipate further changes to the video player in the future. The player is tied into the video hosting solution we use, and at some point we’ll likely transition the hosting over to a self-built solution. At that point, we’d make another update to the player as well.

---

GIFs in Snippets

• Snippets now also support GIFs.

---

Co-Authors for Tutorials

• You can now add more than one author to tutorials. There must always be one owner, but you can associate additional authors.
• In the future, we hope to extend this by also giving editing rights to the associated authors, thereby creating a system in which a group of people can own and work on a tutorial.

---

“Multi-Application” and the future

Another significant development that we’ve been spending a lot of time on is the ability for the Epic Developer Community site to house content and activity for other Epic developer tools and services, such as Epic Online Services.

Our ambition is to create the best and most lively developer community experience possible, where all information comes together in an easily searchable, singular overarching Epic community that interconnects the engine with other tools.

The current estimate for the first iteration of the multi-application community to go live is early autumn. Stay tuned!

[Hourences]

I understand, there are more things to be fixed or looked at for sure. But as with any development thing, be it a game or the engine itself too, there are thousands of topics we need to consider. We got to balance between straight off issues, some old and some new, between nice to haves, between preferences, between investing into the future and larger features, or into investing time to establish the foundation for other things.
And between all of those considerations we got to think of the time it takes to implement it, the number of people it affects, the urgency, stability vs shiny new things, the different ways of achieving the same outcome and so on. What I am trying to say is I understand the points you brought up, but you could say the same of any other software or game development thing. There are a lot of requests, wishes and needs and it is impossible to balance those out perfectly as you must know from developing things.
What I think the most important thing is to navigate the above challenge, is to keep having forward development momentum and to not have a platform/game/engine/tool see its progress stall. To iterate on and on, and to keep up good progress with meaningful impact. That will over time address most things.

On some of the specific points you raised:
UDK → That sounds not ideal yes, we will look at it during August (Epic is in summer break right now). I do want to raise this issue relates to UDK, 2 engine generations ago. UE3. 2009-2013.
Bump Deletion → We will look at it. FYI we did actually just yesterday fix a very similar problem on the tutorial section.
Scrolling → I agree personally, but it is a preference and style thing. We will discuss what the options are, but if we change it it may just lead to similar feedback from people who did like it…
Top 10 Tips → Yes this would be nice, but if we go into the “getting started experience with UE” I think this is a huge topic and there is a ton to do that goes far beyond the top 10 tips or the forum. We need many more tutorials, we need more example and starter games of various difficulty levels, look through documentation, etc. Plus the interface changed with UE5 so a lot of material needs to be recaptured or redone. So no we did not do the top 10 at the moment, but we are instead working through the other ways of approaching this. Our team handled the UE5 templates, we did the Stack O Bot example game, all courses and many of the other Epic tutorials that are being released, the functionality for anyone to be able to post their own tutorials, etc. - all things from the last couple of months. And yes there is so much more to do, and yes overall more KBs would be great, but that is the challenge raised at the start of this post.
Epic Activity on the forum → I hear you and I also fondly remember the 2014 days. But this is the whole point of what we are working towards with this whole community project, to actively stimulate and help people to interact with each other. We just had the Rendering and Anim AUA sessions here that you may have seen. We also have quite a few staff members posting tutorials and snippets. We will keep on going growing it all further

[Rawalanche]

I agree with the sentiment above. We are getting new gimmicks which are not really needed for a good forum experience, yet the basics, which have been broken since the forum migration have still not been fixed:

1. There is still no proper discourse “homepage” where you can see categories and recent posts at once. The combination of the factors of being able to see recent posts without explicitly going to another page, being able to see avatars of familiar users, and seeing a feed of recent posts is what generates the user engagement on discourse:
   
   
2. There is still not option for cleaner, visually simpler theme. The current one is so flashy and visually complex it takes away focus from the content of the posts themselves.
3. The “Remember my choice” checkbox in the external content overlay just straight up doesn’t work at all. Every time I watch a video on this page, I have to get over the redirect overlay. I do not use any special setup. Latest chrome browser without any plugins on Windows.
   
   
4. The content bloat is just too much. Combination of too much UI fluff and too many sticky posts. For example if I go to the rendering section, this is what I see:
   
   
   
   Only the small area marked gree is actually relevant data, the new posts in rendering section. The massive amount of the screen is taken by UI, all sorts of useless thick bars of various colors, and ancient sticky posts.

Just please make the forum not painful to use before adding gimmicks. I used to post on these forums a lot, but after the migration to the developer community, I’ve mostly stopped. The amount of clutter surrounding the actual content I want to focus on (the users’ posts) has became so extreme I just don’t have energy to put up with it anymore.

[bpedroza]

Hi everyone!

I really think the Dev Community is an awesome idea, and with much to offer, congratulations for the first 100 days!

With that said, I also think the Learning area must have some important improvements.
I can’t find my favorite courses, organize my own library or pick up from where I stoped in a course or learning path. Things were better organized in the past version of the learning area, for instances, where are all the badges from the past learning area we had? Have we lost it? And all the progress, lost as well?
I’am quite confused regarding this transition to the new learning area. It’s awesome to be able to share and see all the community content here, but with poor filters and the lack of capability to organize a library with my favorites, personal list and interests, and the capability to manage my progression, fews incomplete and a worse solution than we had before.

[BIGTIMEMASTER (Aljav)]

Hi,

I think it’s great that epic is making a good effort to consolidate info in one place.

I really like the community tutorials, but I’ve found that it is much faster and easier to make the same exact thing but just as a regular post. The problem with community tutorial editor is that it is difficult to see the order in which elements are set.

It’s much faster and easier to just copy/paste images and text into the default thread editor.

I’ve made a couple tiny tutorials myself but i just did it as a regular thread because I found the community-tutorial editor to be difficult to use.

Is there a strong reason to use a separate editor for tutorials versus the regular thread editor? It seems that they end up wiht the same formatting.

[Rawalanche]

- YouTube

(Let me guess, you had to click “Show External Content” to watch this video )