I’ve been having some difficulty for a long while and I thought I’d see if anyone like me is experiencing the same thing. I’m interested in knowing how others deal with the problem and I had an idea. Commiseration is also welcome.
As I’ve gotten more advanced with UE4, I have found it more difficult to find answers to my questions. I do searches for advanced information – and I use specific terms – but I always either get zero results or I get flooded with inane questions from beginners. Then if I ask my question on AnswerHub, I rarely get an answer.
Is this just how it goes? Is there nowhere we can turn to work with UE4 as it was meant to be used? I know I’m not the only one who would like more documentation, but there has to be a way we can compensate.
I was thinking it would be nice if there was a special AnswerHub category that was for ‘elite’ users only – maybe you need to have X karma before it’s available to ask/answer in that category.
You might want to put some examples of the questions that you’re unable to find help with.
To get advanced help, generally people create their own network of fellow UE4 devs.Along with an answerhub question, post in the forums and on discord. Often too general and too specific of questions get ignored. Make sure you know what the problem is, what you’re trying to do, and are able to explain it clearly.
Additionally you can pay an experienced developer for help, or get a custom license with Epic that includes support.
Sometimes I feel that this community is officially the largest Alpha testers (not even Beta) of a game engine or Company that has ever taken place in the history of game engine development.
For free of course. I keep wondering who gets the wrong side of the stick in this deal… : )
90% of the answerhub questions can be solved by spending 30 seconds on google… It ends up burying “worthy” questions in a sea of lazy questions. Opening up some advanced question board will just result in it being flooded with the same stuff. Even if it had some monthly fee like 60USD a month, it would still be flooded with inanity.
What I propose is that Epic give a means for people to flag questions as “entry level” or something like that and after enough votes, it would shove it off into it’s own special category and would remove it from the regular feed of questions. Naturally, there would need to be some kind of system to prevent abuse and flag bombing questions. There are plenty of answer gurus that have no problem with answering a million and one simple questions. Maybe even give more awards or points to the people who do help them with the 10 second google or “read the tooltip” questions. This would be a win-win situation.
I personally think that those of us who are past the basics and answer lots of AH questions deserve to get our own questions answered too. It could just be a private section of the forum. But if it means our questions get special attention from Epic staff then I think they could hook us up a little. Being stuck on a complex problem in UE4 can get painfully lonely.
It would be a complication to try and separate out what people would consider to be Advanced questions, for Epic the people that could possibly answer those questions are engineers working on the engine and they are busy working on that.
Agreed, that is main reason i do not post there, pain in da butt just like wiki.
And on topic, for advanced version of answerhub you need people willing (and knowing how) answer questions. Also how you tell somebody that his\her question is not advanced enough.
So something like stack overflow would be better. I also hate having silly questions (without answers) bury anything useful. But people cannot read sticky messages, before posting in wrong forums or making multiple posts. So do not expect them to stop posting silly questions, that when pasted to google give great tutorial as first answer.
ps. Unreal docs need some better way of sorting outdated information, Epic adds new stuff way to fast for docs (and tutorials) to keep up
darth: Like I said, you give a special forum category to people with karma above some threshold. Then you know they’ve put in their dues and deserve a little affection from Epic directly.
nawrot: Everyone in this advanced section would have proven (via karma) that they are very willing to answer questions and since it’s a smaller group, we can all pay more attention to it knowing it’s going to challenge us and help someone do something amazing.
eblade: When I want to know about something advanced, my search nets 100 pages of the same simple questions. Once it’s been asked and answered that many times it qualifies as inane. Because noobs are lazy they don’t do the search, and since there’s a lot more of them than us, our searches get flooded with irrelevant hits and our questions get drowned out.
Edit: This would also work because in this advanced category we’d know that almost every time, the question being asked has been thoroughly researched and still remains an issue.
You’re right. Because those of us that come to the forums, or AH do answer issues, and post solutions.
It would also be good to allow them an Admin setting to delete the multitude of trash, and re-posts.
It could clean up the countless idle unanswered posts of junk, and clutter.
