Hi! Unreal Engine is great but there are a few things that I’d love to see in the upcoming 4.12 version. This list will include a few things that Unreal Engine should learn from the Source engine. I don’t think it should be a problem to implement simple features from a 12 years old engine, and it would really make Unreal Engine even more amazing than it is right now.
- Water - making water in UE is a complicated process in which you will have to make a water material, apply it to a mesh without collision and put a physics volume inside it. This is what I have in mind:
A new “Water” type of material that will be able to be applied to a surface to make it swimmable, much like in the Source engine. In addition, dynamic fluid\wave and maybe even cauctis based on the waves would be really awesome! - A new FPS template:
A player with an animated mesh (with the animations from the “Animation Starter Pack”, they are great) and a weapon system that allow the player to pick up weapons, fire them, reload, change weapons and pick up ammo.
It’s just like the Animation Starter Pack, but it comes with a weapon system and weapons, as well as having the hands and the head to rotate upwards and downwards with the camera, making it suitable for FPS games. - A ‘NoDraw’ material:
A simple material that tells the engine not to draw the mesh\side of the mesh that it has been applied too. - That “Planar Reflections” thing that was added to the pre-release is just complicated and will be a hassle in my opinion. Add an option to use real time reflections in any object instead. As the Darkplaces engine shows, it isn’t as resource intensive as you might think.
- Add support for more models’ formats such as 3ds, blend, max, etc… Anything will help.
- Make the level editing more Source engine’s Hammer editor and CAD like. Enough said. The Hammer editor has the best geometry creation and editing tools with no doubt.
Really hope to see at least some of these features in the new engine. Best of luck!