Changes to the official Unreal Engine Wiki

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.

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.

Is this early April Fool’s? It bloody better be, otherwise it’s a monumental screwing over half of the UE4 users, if not more.

Well, that is dumb.

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

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

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)?

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.

Relatively new to UE4 - had found this wiki entry very helpful in getting started with the Ability System plugin.
https://wiki.unrealengine.com/GameplayAbilities_and_You
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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

New Documentation is useless… now the most usefull thing we had you removed… Well done!!

2 Likes

That’s REALLY bad. I don’t think Epic realizes how much valuable information was in the Wiki.

Can we at least get a zip of the wiki? There’s a lot of information that was in there that is not found anywhere else.

I almost had a panic attack when I saw all the wiki articles I was working with redirect to this thread. There’s very useful information contained in the wiki. This presents a huge usability problem for the engine.

At the moment we can still use the google cache but when that goes the otherwise undocumented c++ features are going to require a lot more effort to use.

As a bare minimum, you can use the wayback machine to access pages of the wiki: Standalone Dedicated Server - Epic Wiki