So, not sure what’s going on here… but hotfixes shouldn’t be making releases worse than launch…it should be making them better. Yet every hotfix is increasingly making this release a really bad choice for me to have updated my project to.
Let’s start off with the increased compile times in any decent sized BP due to the strict future requirement of the broken Blueprint Compilation Manager (and also the reroute node bug if you try to disable it, it’ll mark it as dirty).
Now in 4.19.2 I am getting crazy silly random Asserts over various Blueprints that make absolutely NO SENSE (such as an asset on a BPFL function for a Game Instance getter that is the ONLY Game Instance in the game and has been set as such for months), plenty of other Blueprints are throwing out random asserts that make no sense… what is going on with the QA team for releases?
Is All Hands Fornite: BR really going to keep us from seeing greatness in the engine as developers (I know we’ll get the scraps from Fortnite and maybe UT dev)? (Let’s not talk about the fact that the new VOIP stuff isn’t implemented for OSS Steam, even though that’s what the majority of your users will be using for their platform, among other silliness I’m seeing going on around the engine)
And the fact we can’t rollback Launcher (hotfix) Versions in the Launcher (so 4.19.2 to 4.19.1) kind of sucks…
I have to say you raise a good point with Fortnite. Whenever Epic takes on a new project (first UT, then Paragon, now Fortnite - due to the recent fame I know it was out for a while before -) what precedes it tends to suffer. And initially it seemed to be just their aforementioned game projects, but it’s concerning to think that they may be shifting resources away from engine development to meet the demand of this new battle royale trend. Especially if they have the potential to cause show stopping bugs in the latest version of the editor. I’ve been battling my own issues for the last few versions of UE4 where custom collision tends to bug out, and reimporting assets do not update properly. This has caused many headaches and increase dev time just to try to work around this that shouldn’t have made it live to begin with due to the common nature of some of these processes.
That’s usually caused by a broken loop elsewhere in your code and the compiler doesn’t know exactly where, so it spits a random error. I’ve seen those kinds of errors for probably the past seven releases and it always turns out to be broken somewhere else. Check your code.
I don’t understand today’s culture where the assumption is that the programmer hasn’t checked his code before posting something on the forums out of frustration. But thanks.
This project started out in 4.15 and has seen updates to 4.17 , 4.18 and now 4.19. And in each, they had issues and I was able to resolve them.
The problem here is that in 4.19/4.19.1 everything was working fine (minus my other grievances such as the BP Compilation Manager increasing my Compile times 10-50x times) where these random asserts are occuring, only when I updated to 4.19.2 yesterday that all he11 broke loose in my project.
Right, that’s pretty much what I have been trying to say anytime I get a chance to, but you did it better than I. Fortnite BR seems to have taken a lot of resources away from Engine Dev (like pure Engine Dev/QA) and left us with frustration after frustration each new release.
On one hand, of course I get it…as a fellow developer…if I were making $2-6 million a day on a game…I’d shift focus to that money maker (focusing on the players). On the other hand, I don’t have “millions of developers” that would be using my product for their own projects. Epic needs to decide if they can maintain the Engine AND Game Developer model/strategy they have been employing over the past few years. If not, they need to hire out someone from the outside to help them build a new strategy ( I say outside, because sometimes we get blinded by our own ambitions and can’t see what’s right in front of us, like that hole in the ship…causing water to come inside)
Anyway, I am obviously looking forward to 4.19.3, truly wish we had a way to at least rollback to previous minor releases on the launcher. This is much easier to work with on Source builds. I’d love to see the ratio of Launcher/Source devs though.
They have outsourced some work to smaller studios in my state, I’m starting to think they are all hands on deck to the point they need more people. They have like 200 openings right now as well.
just hope we get to see some solid work down the line for the issues were having now
Yes in 4.20, they stated it will be mandatory in another thread… this is something that’s going to really ruin a lot of people… I don’t understand why force it down on us when it’s obviously not working as intended for the majority of devs that are actually working on big/long term projects.
With money money comes more employment. Im sure we will see a return to confident releases soon enough, especially when said game is making over $200m in a month. That goes a long way to producing quality results in business. Ask Blizzard.
The with hiring out new devs (contractors) for Engine work…is they are brand spanking new and it takes awhile to get them acquainted with all the systems (no matter what their experience level may be). Then they’ll make mistakes. For games… that can be a bit more forgiving (bugs can be funny as long as it’s not game-breaking)… but for Engine Tech…they should be having the majority of their experienced engineers focused on the Engine, rather than a Game…
But that’s not really how we (at least publicly) are seeing it. Most, if not all their experienced engineers are working on Fortnite right now. Some are pulling double-duty doing some Engine Tasks (unless git commits are just done by leads after overviewing, then maybe not)
But really, it’s easy to see how much the Engine has suffered over the past year(s) due to no real commitment/focus to the engine. Was 4.10 really the only Stable Release? IIRC, we were supposed to have them every 5 Major Versions. But 4.15 did not get that treatment. 4.18/4.19 seemed like they should have been, but they introduced a lot of bugs (which seem to take a long time now to get hotfixed, so much so, they abandoned 4.18’s issues outright)
Is it possible we’ll see some sort of Holy Grail in the form of 4.20? Will it be lit enough to be the most stable release since 4.10?
Its actually a pretty solid assertion honestly, the best person to check code is not the person who wrote it. You could be sitting there looking at a picture for a week and not see something, a person comes up and in the first few seconds they point something out you havent noticed. Rather than shrugging someone off you should really get your code checked by someone else to be sure. Obviously that doesnt negate your complaints about the engine and I dont think that was their intent with trying to be helpful.
On the actual topic I saw this with UDK in particular after mobile became hot sauce the PC version of the engine suffered in stability and half done features as the focus shifted. Epic has 200 positions advertised and while they seem to see that as a selling point I actually wonder what is wrong internally with the company that they need so many people, that could just be a false flag on my guts part but it doesnt sit right with me.
That said I share your concerns but as I havent used 4.19 myself (waiting for 4.20) I havent seen these particular issues or any I could contribute to Epics focus on Fortnite, I certainly think its in the realm of possibility especially with all the recent login issues which clearly looks poor on Epics part from the Enterprise standpoint. I mean I could drone on about warning them about issues arising from the leak but all I got was “blah blah we’re taking it seriously blah blah” which is much the response you get when you find an intermittent bug. I dont really feel like part of something bigger in terms of Epic on the Engine end, dont get me wrong they do great stuff to keep us all trained up but its about more than that, as a community we’ve all built rapport with one and other but Epic seems to be outside of that and Im worried with the community management focus on Fortnite the engine community will suffer even worse.
Please try to keep this discussion civil and within the forum rules. It hasn’t been too bad so far, this is just a reminder.
@**Here_2_annoy_all **- As mentioned in your other thread, your posts are not being deleted, they need to be approved by a moderator first when you are a new user. Your initial reply on this topic was removed because this is not the right forum for Fortnite related issues. Please use these forums for Fortnite: https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/forums
Yeah I am totally not and I saw no evidence of Paragon having a detrimental effect on the engine, it didnt get to the same point that Infinity Blade and Fortnite did though.
Im fully aware Epic are also a games company but what Im saying is that if Epic arnt careful the focus on Fortnite could hurt their engine business irreparably which will end up costing them alot more than a fast buck long term. Games these days are lucky to last a decade, Unreal Engine could be around 50+ years from now if Epic play their cards right, in the business world the (electronic) game industry is barely a new born compared to other industries where there are plenty of companies with 100+ years of reputation and these are the types of enterprise customers Epic is trying to appeal to.
