Thought to make a quick list of what is still causing headaches in game design/ level design. Before I start, please know this list may be biased because its not based on Verse or heavy mechanics (since I do mostly art, game design, and level design), so it will be its core focus on art.
- Missing 3-dimensional Landscape editing
You can’t make a floating island with the current landscape tools, or a cave without using static meshes to cover the hole. I would love some 3-dimensional voxel editing, that we can also affect in-game time.
- Instanced worlds
Since UEFN is optimized for multiplayer games, the biggest missing feature is to allow instantiated spaces to exist, that contain logic and can exist in a multiplayer world, where not all players can see it. Think a hub that allows you to see other players, but then go outside and all monsters are your level and the world is catered to the unlocks you ve done, and the same happens to other players, without each other sharing progress outside the hub (and outside parties).
- Level switching with information passed
There is always a hard limit to what you can do in a UEFN game, as dictated by project size and memory. Allowing us to connect different maps together and passing information between them will allow us to create campaigns and full games that track inventory and events triggered in all worlds.
- Instanced asynchronous cinematics
Currently, if you watch an instigated cinematic, no other player can also instigate it and watch it in their own time. It simply breaks for them and it gets skipped. Same thing as the above, this is needed for immersive experiences that exist in a multiplayer format. That, and collision to be instigated in cinematics too.
- Memory management tools
In UEFN atm we don’t know the highest cluster of memory unless we perform a memory calculation process that may take up to 1hr 36 mins when using HLODs. This number, being the one that locks editing, is the most important metric to a world designer. However, this is never shown anywhere in UEFN or live edit (not to be confused with memory on current cluster that we have now) like its shown in every UGC editor out there (and Creative). We need this asap so we know what happens with asset placement. There is also no instance cost preview anymore, or live thermal map, and it makes optimization impossible when using world streaming.
- Server Profiling tools
We don’t know what is happening in the server when a game is launched. We don’t know what stresses it and we don’t have a way to stress it unless we have 24+ virtual machines to connect to the same game. This is an issue, because we make one MP game, then one release we see another. And when players see a buggy mess on release they will give no other chance to it, even if the issues are addressed. But what is worse than that though, is that the issues are inherent to the BP actors themselves, meaning if you use FN props you have no workaround to optimize the server performance.
- Testing Public Flow from editor
Similar to the above.
- Quick Prototyping
Live edit still takes up to 40 mins to launch on connections with bad internet (could be more for edge cases). We need a rapid prototyping flow that allows gameplay mechanics to be quickly tested without having the entire project loaded.
- Player control
The ability to control the player is still heavily missing from UEFN. We want to change the model, apply animations, have them speak, and affect all their movement mechanics.