Here are a few features that I’d love to see in the engine:
-Instead of that planar reflection concept just add the option to change that in the material’s\plane’s settings.
-Make the Geometry Editor more CAD and Source engine’s Hammer editor like. I think that it is much quicker and better to add\edit geometry like that. Now, an attempt to implement some kind of geometry creation but it is nothing like the Hammer editor and, honestly, the Hammer editor is the best and easiest level editor to use out there. Don’t get me wrong, I am very experienced with the Unreal editor, but it took me 7 minutes in the Hammer editor and 45 minutes to make a level in the Unreal editor and still I did not get excactly what I wanted.
-Proper water. I think that we can all agree that having a surface with a water material, no collision and a physics volume inside of it is not very good.
-Better displacement mapping. I map all of my textures using AwesomeBump and the displacement always looks spikey and incorrect. I don’t think that it’s a problem with the textures because when I tried the same with Cryengine it looked really nice.
-Add more ways to optimize levels. There is alot to learn from the Source engine when it comes to optimizing. First of all, ‘nodraw’ material that prevents the engine from rendering surfaces it’s been applied to would be very highly appreciated. Also, areaportals would be very helpful as well as the hint texture. Siriously, there is no shame in learning things from the Source engine. It has nailed many things that other engines couldn’t.
-Fix the engine\launcher getting stuck when they aren’t in use. I have already posted this but I’d still like to mention it here. Both the launcher and the editor freeze when their window isn’t active, meaning that I clicked on another window or opened another program. It is really flattering.
That’s pretty much it. I’d like to see these above-mentioned things in the next version of Unreal Engine as I am certain that they will make the engine easier to use.