Changes to the official Unreal Engine Wiki

General Announcements
1

You can download a mirror of the Unreal Engine Wiki site here. Please keep in mind, this repository does not include full site functionality, but the contents of the Wiki are all there.

Original Post

After over a year in maintenance mode, the official Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline.

We recognize that the Wiki has been a valuable resource for many of you during your development journey, and we will be incorporating the top-visited content from the Wiki into various official resources, such as blogs, documentation, and forum discussions. Original authors will, of course, continue to be credited for their efforts.

Thank you to those of you who have contributed to the Wiki with your knowledge and tutorials over the years. You’ve helped grow and encourage the community to become what it is today, and we hope you will stay engaged here, guiding and supporting each other.

Looking for help? Visit unrealengine.com/support to access loads of community resources, as well as Unreal Online Learning, our growing catalog of nearly 50 free courses and curated learning paths.

Lastly, are there any Wiki resources that you have found to be particularly helpful that are not reflected in existing documentation or tutorials? Please let us know in the comments below and we’ll work to surface that content!

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*Update *

*Why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? *
The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way.

April 3, 12:35 PM EDT
You can download a mirror of the Unreal Engine Wiki site here. Please keep in mind, this repository does not include full site functionality, but the contents of the Wiki are all there.

We are still exploring how we may be able to export the Wiki data to the community members who are looking to stand up a centralized, community-hosted Wiki, to help expedite their efforts. Thanks so much to those that are coordinating the initiative and have reached out!

2

This isn’t very helpful, Amanda! I know that the wiki wasn’t optimal, but there were many wiki pages developers like me had bookmarked for years beacuse they contained comprehensive and easy information, which is now missing. Why not just keep the wiki read-only online? Just to retain the old pages? I’m pretty lost right now without some of these articles and I don’t understand why the only option you had was to completely disable it. Please think about opening it up again just for read. I don’t care about the maintenance mode, but the wiki was an important learning point, which is now gone.

Cheers

2 Likes
3

Why take the wiki down **before **duplicating the information in other areas? Aside from the fact that scattered resources like forums, blogs (and even UDN) are nice as supplemental and no replacement for a community updated repository.

Its more than just a “learning point”, there are/were explanations on this wiki that never made it to the official documentation. At a bare minimum, could we get a dump of the wiki so the information could still exist?

4

Oh no! Is there no way of leaving the wiki up as read-only and, as you make the articles available elsewhere, forward to them? Reason I ask is because sections of the wiki are still the top Google answer for several questions, for example “UE4 On Particle Collide”.

2 Likes
5

hello, I recommend that the **Linking DLLs **wiki should be made available as it is the only document used worldwide in linking dlls to the unreal build.

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Like… all of them.

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I have to agree with the comments above.

I believe decision makers at Epic don’t see how fundamental some information on the wiki were, and how those will probably be never reflected in the docs due to structural differences. Documentation is more like a theoretical bootstrapper, with everything explained, reasoned, etc, but missing one key thing: very easy to read examples. Not projects to download, not YouTube videos to watch, just 50 lines of raw code, which explains everything.

While documentation answers the question “how does it work?” (with many technical parts missing), the wiki asked the question “how do I actually use it?”.
Like, how to do an async task in C++, how to set up your plugin, how to compress save games, etc. Small snippets, which were a great starting point.

So, I guess that’s why this “change” is less than welcome by the community: we’ll never see these snippets and mini-tutorials again, and they will probably never be a part of the documentation.
I’m not sure why do I take the time by writing this down, as evidently there isn’t a discussion the community is a part of, we just have to live with decisions made by Epic, unilaterally.

8

It’s disappointing to hear that these have been taken down as the information filled in holes that are not covered in the UE4 documentation. Can you at least have a legacy hosting for this so this information is not lost? Just followed a link to the wiki for a pertinent article that has helped me a number of previous times only to find it now doesn’t exist.

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Well, that is dumb.

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Why would anyone stay engaged here if their previous work was thrown away?

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I would also like to express my disappointment with this decision. UE4 already has the issue of inadequate documentation and while the wiki was poorly organized and looked unprofessional, at least it was better than nothing. I think removing it is just going to leave people lost or force people to use archived copies of the wiki, as many search engines will still return the wiki as the top result. Don’t get me wrong, the quality of the wiki was poor, but as KristofMorva said it was the only place to find concise snippets of code showing how things worked.

As an example, something I often forget the syntax of is the dedicated server target C# file. When I search ue4 dedicated server, three of the four top results are now defunct wiki pages. I cannot find this information on docs, whether it is absent or hard to find.

The only docs page I find is this:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/…ver/index.html

which is not nearly as useful as

[A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums](A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Standa…dicated_Server
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/Dedica…er_Guide_Steam

I also think
https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/…tem/index.html
is less informative and is missing some details compared to

There are many more examples of this.

I think this content is useful as well, I could not find any other comprehensive docs on logging: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements and Releases - Unreal Engine Forums

13

Have to agree with the other comments here, taking the wiki offline with no fair warning is going to cause a lot of problems for some developers down the line. Could you at least consider putting it back up for a week or two so people can archive the pages they want, or maybe even release some kind of archive that the community can redistribute themselves (like a bunch of PDFs of the wiki pages or something)?

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I have wasted many hours of work today trying to access some bookmarked pages on the wiki that I have relied upon. Sure there is out of date info on the wiki, but I have always been capable of looking at the publish date to determine the likelihood of out of date information myself.

15

Relatively new to UE4 - had found this wiki entry very helpful in getting started with the Ability System plugin.

A guide talking through the specific steps needed to get from stock ThirdPersonController project to firing off your first ability setup similar to this page would be a good addition to existing documentation and the ARPG sample project.

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To echo everyone else, bringing it online as an archive to download would at least be helpful.

To bring up another undocumented topic, packaging out dedicated server builds has no information outside what was available (albeit in poor form) in the wiki.
I’m sure there is a handful of other such topics (Gerstner waves come to mind) were the best source of UE4 specific information was the wiki pages.

This will be a problem especially since the site is down but redirects here, it will lead to most web archives caching the wrong data as a result (i.e very difficult to recover that information).

17

So, in plain English, you (Epic Inc.) have “just” had removed access to all the wiki pages (content) created by other people (e.g. 3d parties / supporters / loyal community) in a one-way manner, without prior notice, without “grace period”, without even an apology.

I do appreciate that I have had stumbled upon this case prior to being heavily invested into the UE4 development (selecting engines stage).

You (Epic Inc.) have just herewith by thine own hand depreciated all the prior efforts made by Epic Inc. (e.g. yourself) such as acquiring Quixel, Cubic Motion, offering an “Epic Grant” and whatnot effectively downto zero.

Since you (Epic Inc.) can so easily make such internal changes affecting your own loyal community, then nobody would be convinced that this will not happen again in a different form (e.g. license, royalties, whatnot) in the future - just like the you-know-who did last year (whom Epic made every effort to differentiate themselves from).

This move / approach / attitude alone clearly indicates the priorities: corporations-centric, with an authoritarian Chinese signature (cough Tencent cough).

I have seen this before in creative world (Adobe) and have had hopes this will not happen with Epic, but I am glad to notice how wrong I was and make it this early.

Open source all the way.

Thank you for paying attention.

Edit: spelling.

18

What a great decision, I’ve never got an answer to my posts on unreal forum or answer hub, this wiki was my only quick way of figuring out things, its even better than that missing documentation on https://docs.unrealengine.com/

I gotta step back, and clap for you.

19

I agree with this decision as there was many outdated info in the wiki, but please improve the documentation about multiplayer with for example the replication wiki page info etc

20

I just started with the UE4. The Wiki provided a nice little Tutorial about setting up a dedicated server application. Really sad to see it was taken down. A downloadable archive would be really great.

21

We hear your concerns and frustrations. And we missed an opportunity to give you notice prior to the Wiki page coming down, and for that we apologize.

So why can’t we put a read-only archive online currently? The Wiki, even in it’s read-only state, was presenting security risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.

We still have the data, and as mentioned above, we will work to migrate the top content into various official resources. In the meantime, we’re investigating how we can make this content available, even in a rudimentary way.

Some individuals from the community have already reached out to explore a community-hosted Wiki. We are following up with these folks and are evaluating next steps to see what may be possible here as well.