Why is nobody on these forums helpful anymore? I keep opening up questions and bug reports and nobody responds! Have people abandoned these forums?
Why are all the options that I have been using up until now been disabled or removed? Why are plugins compatibility locked and can no longer be installed? Why is procedural foliage disabled and not available when it was before? Why are my material previews within blueprints broken and display as black boxes?
I was excited for this update but it has been a huge disappointment and waste of time. Nothing works and my project is pretty much broken thanks to these stupid backwards changes. Is there no quality control or proper testing involved before these updates are pushed? I get that using the latest version of the editor is optional but I would have rather waited an extra month than have to deal with this garbage.
I am seriously annoyed over the time wasted and these forums are so dead.
Edit:
I ended up figuring out the answers to most of my questions myself. I finally found a video that goes in depth with the new 5.7 foliage builder. This was all over a month after release and nobody knew anything about it. Someone had to know but it was most likely a developer who doesn’t check these forums to answer questions.
5.7 had reset most of my pcg and project settings. Every single option that my project uses heavily was broken upon install and all I could find about them were outdated tutorials. It was as if I were starting from square 1 again looking at every single project setting and needing to reinstall plugins that have worked since many versions back.
I’m still waiting on an answer on another post as to why all of the in blueprint texture/material previews are broken.
feels like 2 steps forward 1 step backward sometimes.
my project started on 5.1. then move to 5.3 then 5.4. (tried 5.5 and 5.6. both broke many aspects i wasnt prepared to chase up on ) 5.7 looks promising first time i seen performance gains OOB without doing anything (havent upgraded project to 5.7) but still a couple of major issues.
i use landscape tool. its still a bit broken for me. but was totally unusable in 5.5/5.6 (manage/add landscape tiles scuffed as hell) enums and other da’s broke.
but yeah. 5.7 (with smaa and mover and the other new toys do look amazing) and yeah feels a bit dead here. its almost as if things are handled somewhere else (discord) perhaps. and people dont follow up here anymore. ?
I think the main issue lies with not enough staffing to go through all the posts on here. The one guy is a volunteer and he’s been around for years. Sometimes I’ll hear from other people but rarely if it’s to help troubleshoot something that’s not working out within the editor.
simple, there is no help for now, and for next few yrs. ue5.7 is what is, if we hope for performance as was in ue4 its never go to heappend, possibilitys a shrinked. also its just to mutch new stufs in engine, its just overhealmed. people needs time to explore , try and test so its very hard to get help accordingly.
I didn’t want to try it because I knew there would be a few issues. I waited until the official release to install it. I ended up figuring out most of my issues yesterday. It was mostly unnecessary anxiety that could have been avoided if they didn’t change certain things with no instruction. Or the instructions are outdated and need to be searched for.
Honestly? I kinda gave up, it’s just not worth it! I got the Devotee badge in 2023 and I was really active and willful to help people but when I needed a hand I always had to find it at the end of my arm, as you can see from my questions (And despite everything I’ve always come back to post the solution for others in future)
I’ve started using Unreal in 2021 and watched the decline of the AnswerHub (badly converted into this forum, sometimes you can find old questions where the answer is swapped with the question), the destruction of the Unreal Wiki (you can find an enormous amount of dead links to it bringing nowhere) and the pointless automatically generated documentation that tells you nothing more that hovering the function in BP or looking at the source code in C++ (Please tell what purpose serves a page like this…)
The forum has been working decently in the last year, but it hasn’t always been like this, it used to have horrible bugs (like being completely inaccessible/unusable from mobile or limiting the number of posts that you could vote), there was an option to flag posts and indicate the specific issue with the post, now it’s just limited to “report as off topic, inappropriate, spam or illegal”, I’ve cooperated several times with moderators to mark posts as solved or fix other issues but that is no longer an option! I just think they don’t care!
I don’t understand if they are too few to handle all the work (both on the forum an on the development of the engine)
They ignore basic pull requests to fix errors they introduced with the updates, typos or bad naming but they felt the urge to rename “Set master pose” to “Set leader pose” because it wasn’t politically correct, officially making all the previous tutorials outdated)
The “coup de grace” for me was the UEFN integration with the forum instead of having separated sections, my bookmark has always been this page and it was useful to find new posts with people to help, now half of the questions are about Fortnite stuff and it’s really not in my interest to dive into it..
So, yeah, I throw in the towel for now🏳️
Sorry for the wall of text but your intro triggered me!
the reason nobody uses the forums anymore, is because they changed the entire style of the site for no reason… its extremely difficult to navigate now. the search feature isnt very accurate in a lot of cases, especially compared to how it used to work on the old forum site…
Gen Z and younger dont use the forums much, Millenials and Gen X are starting to quit and give up on this industry and for good reasons; the U.S. economy is absolute ■■■■. During covid everybody was investing into “Virtual Stuff” because everybody was at home all the time. When covid slowly ended, all of those cool concepts and ideas were either too expensive to keep up with, couldnt find the user base big enough to be profitable, or simply did what they were meant for and are finished. Before Covid, there was emerging VR Tech and mobile was still new and everybody was building the infrastructure for it. Most of the jobs were non-videogame jobs from other industries making cool ■■■■, like advertising, marketing, ecommerce, etc. A lot of actual video-game jobs were hobbyists or people outside the U.S. with all the tarriffs and the fact that nobody has money to invest in anything anymore, theres no game jobs, and not much new hardware for companies to explore.
On top of that, since steam and epic games have been overflooded with thousands and thousands of games at a point in time where nobody has disposable income, nobody is pulling a profit from sales, we have hit a point where too many people are doing this for it to actually be profitable unless there are big names behind it or millions of dollars to advertise.
Then there’s AI, allowing any idiot to replace graphic designers, programmers, animators, and 3d modelers… The world is ending. This technology is rendering our jobs obsolete. nobody is regulating it. If we arent going on a basic income, were all going to die.
If that’s not bad enough. Epic Games own CEO is trying to destroy the gaming industry from the inside out. He has made major investments in the development of AI and the technologies that use AI. It’s one thing to develop AI as a useful tool, but 99% of its usage is literally stealing other artists work and labelling it as their own because they made their AI s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶ “learn“ from it.
AI itself is not the problem though. There are countless number of incredible and groundbreaking applications for AI that have nothing to do with generating stolen artwork from a text prompt. If only the majority of people using it weren’t so lazy and nearsighted as to think that that’s what AI is meant for.
I dont understand what the industry’s plan is moving forward… If AAA studios that make games like Final Fantasy or Street Fighter are using it, maybe. But There is no reason for anybody to spend money on an ai generated indie game… There’s no art or anything to appreciate… and humans cant compete with ai… I honestly think videogames, television, and music are going to die out very quickly, and its not like theres other jobs to replace them with.
User unfriendly - Now they are really focused on satisfying big companies that emphasize their brand. The problem is that they are starting to overcomplicate even a lot of basic things (from input to reimport ). Basically, they are doing different things based on people who have very specific habits (e.g. working with in-house engines, filmmakers, etc.), which makes work quite hell
Bugs - it’s probably no secret that UE is now a symbol for bugs in development and unoptimized games. I still kind of understand optimization part. But the engine, lots of unfinished features, has outgrown them.
But the worst is probably coming with UE6. Honestly? In the last 16 years, I’ve enjoyed working with the engine for about 13. The last three years have really been just a misery.
Epic does support for developers on their “private forum”. I use it at work myself. But for mere mortals… well, he’s already left you.
The point? UE has long since ceased to be user-friendly for indie development. It’s a good file for experimenters. It’s the same decline that Crytek once demonstrated a few years ago.
btw: the last thing I really started laughing at were the Chinese comments in engine
). Basically, they are doing different things based on people who have very specific habits (e.g. working with in-house engines, filmmakers, etc.), which makes work quite hell