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.
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.
It would take a decent a web developer two days at most to write a script to take the content from the Wiki’s database and convert it into static HTML files which can be served with no risk at all, or just point an off-the-shelf web spider at it and it’ll produce usable files in an hour. It would take a decent sysadmin a day to move the entire wiki onto an untrusted external host such as AWS outside of the corporate network which would remove any threat.
That a company with Epic’s resources would think it better to throw away all of the community effort which went into writing those guides, ruin one of the few good searchable resources on UE4 with answers and not just questions, and basically throw away a lot of good will says a lot about the reality of their community engagement.
I just started writing my project in UE4 and am now putting this engine away, never using it. You have scared off your new users and potential customers, burned your existing ones.
Tell your sales department whatever fancy courses or training they were hoping to capitalize on came at the expense of what was otherwise a very attractive platform.
This is ridiculous, quality UE4 documentation is already hard enough to come by as it is. That resource was one of the most useful resources available.
The quality of life for the engine, especially as a programmer, has significantly diminished with the removal of this resource.
This should have been migrated to some form of read-only site, pdf, something.
This move clearly illustrates that Epic does not care about their non-AAA developers or smaller teams who can’t afford custom engines or internal knowledge bases to address the lack of tangible UE4 documentation for numerous features. The biggest downside to Unreal is the knowledge gap which has been widened even further now.
I still work in UE4 professionally, but this action makes me thankful I made the recent decision to move to Unity for my personal projects as I don’t have to worry about invaluable resources being arbitrarily killed off.
Like many of you I am also affected by this loss of this once readily available community knowledge. In the spirit of serving my fellow game developers who have come to rely on the information that the wiki provided, I have begun an initiative to capture the contents of the article in an open-source Gitbook (and Github repository). If you’re interested in helping me archive (and potentially update) the most useful articles that used to exist on the wiki, it would be greatly appreciated.
This choice is amazing. I have been working with Unreal for 3 months to learn to develop content in VR.
I picked Unreal as technically superior despite the FUD to the effect of “Why would you pick a game engine from people who compete with you making games?”
The documentation is tragic, I’ve stopped commenting on it and now just search youtube. The git integration is incomplete work. I came here for the **** wiki on the git plugin: GitHub - SRombauts/UE4GitPlugin: Unreal Engine 4 Git LFS 2 Source Control Plugin (beta) Do I need it in 4.24, do I not? Why is version control even an issue? I’m super frustrated at the missed opportunities.
The game engine code may be great, but so much of what I’m encountering with using the product is incomplete work.
I’m guessing this is a combination of a total pownage on your internal systems, multiplied by some serious technical debt, excused by an indifference to your community and customers.
I’m guessing this is a bad day for you too, but seriously, as an organization, get it together. We all want this to work better. What is the plan, and what do you need from your community to support you?
The wiki was a great resource for filling in the gaps in documentation. I’ve already been redirected to this announcement several times tonight just searching for answers to different problems. In particular the page on logging and its many samples was essential for our team. Please put up a mirror as soon as possible.
I wanted to add my strong disapproval of this action. Epic has relied on the community to provide documentation and examples where it was not able, and now it has removed community contributions, community content, without warning or consent.
The content removed represents many hours of FREE work put in by developers in this community, and Epic decided to snap it out of existence. Ridiculous.
I am part of an academic club at a university here in Montreal. We specialize in helping new students discover game development and integrate the industry. Unity3D has always been very attractive to newcomers and since I’ve joined I’ve always tried to steer people toward Unreal Engine and make them interested but this move makes it even more difficult to recommend.
Sickeningly terrible decision. The most important things your non-AAA, non-custom-licensee customers have is the documentation. Letting us use Quixel and other aquisitions free of charge don’t fill the hole - fancy tools are useless to all but the AAA without documentation. Most new features you’ve released recently have been horribly (or not at all) documented as well, so they just don’t get used in non AAA projects because nobody without a UDN account can access accurate information.
It almost feels like the Unreal Engine documentation is deliberately bad, and it’s definitely unusable. It’s bizarre - every other engine is well documented and offers far more in the way of tutoring to its non-AAA users than a few sparse, incredibly specialised video tutorials and “”“documentation”"" consisting of mostly blank pages.
I don’t get it. I don’t get how this helps you. Help me get into the headspace for this decision, because I’m lost - how does it help you to let people use the engine for free at all if you are then going to not only give them basically no documentation or assistance, but even actively hinder a shared community understanding and exchange of knowledge by purporting to give people a space to put tutorials and guides, and then deleting it and everything contained without any warning? How is it more profitable to basically turn away developers who would otherwise make popular games that grant you additional revenue money because they cannot afford a UDN license?