WHAT
Remember a couple weeks back when we ran out of time talking about the updates heading your way in 4.8? Mike Fricker is back to finish the conversation, and we’re bringing along Matt Kuhlenschmidt, too, to help us catch up on all the great questions we had roll in.
The first of the 4.8 Preview releases should be available sometime this week as well, so keep an eye out for that!
[Question]
Regarding bug fixes, has there been any work towards making sure things that work in the editor environment continue to work in the “standalone” test or the shipped project. I seem to consistently run into issues where what I thought to have been working is broken in different ways for the standalone and shipped versions of the project, making it impossible to ever feel relaxed after I have something working as it should in the editor, because now it seems I have to test it multiple times outside that where I don’t even have access to the in editor debugging tools to narrow down where things could be going wrong somehow, when they shouldn’t anyway because it works properly in the editor so it’s not inherently an issue I should even need to fix and I can’t report a bug because I don’t even know what the bug is nor where it could be located.
I would really really love to just be able to make a game in Unreal Engine and no everything I’m working on and seeing as playable could actually be shared with others but with my recent feature addition to my project, discovering it broken in standalone and other areas of my game broken in shipped, I can’t even record a video to show them it let alone actually hope to send out a game for other people to play-there is no point if I’m the only one able to play it as intended in the editor.
Can we expect with 4.8, improvment on the Cooking & chunk creation documentation? As of today, it’s a little bit hard to get the proper information. More, when you add directories for non directly referenced asset to be taken into account, you don’t know if it’s just the folder or all the subdirectories. Their should be some guidelines like on UMG references in C++ where you should linked to the generated class “_C” and not the asset. I know it’s still in progress, but Cooking is clearly an important part of the final move to Beta Testers, and it could be great to cover this part as you did with all the features of UE.
On UMG side, can we expect some improvment like Styling(This topic is opened in answerhub since October)? Panel easy Reordering? You just set last week a new card on trello for this but I’m wandering why it took so long to put standard features in UMG as they are already in Slate. More, when reading the trello card, I undersdtand that UMG update is driven by Fortnite needs… is that really it? You just waited for Fortnite specs to improve this part?
Don’t get me wrong, you are doing awesome job and I’m really pleased to use UE and always surprised on how complicated things can be setup easily, but sometimes you are doing buzz && fuzz on topics and let it down until 2 or more versions (which is months at the end of us ^^).
4.8 seems really promissing and again, I will be pleased to play with it.
Ps: I would like to put some attention on this issue. It’s a base feature of BP that it’s broken and it’s slowing down the production workflow and lead to errors for beginners. When I first raise my concerns in the forum, a lot of people answered with workaround solution until someone from Epic said that should be the default behavior. I worked with the support team to reproduce the error so I hope to get it a fix in 4.8. Thanks
Also, before 4.7 we could make blueprint from objects layed in level - just selecting whatever I want, click on “replace with composite blueprint” and that’s it, it converts to BP. But this funtionality no longer exists so can we expecting that will come back in 4.8 or later?
That was realy usefull back in a day
This functionality still exists, it’s in the Blueprints toolbar button (both one actor ‘subclass’ and many actor ‘component harvest’ actions; the one-actor subclass action is also in the details panel at the top level).
Question for Mike Fricker. I noticed that you started working on support for VS 2015 (master branch). Is there a timeline on when this will be completed?
So what should we expect feature wise compared to the 4.8 GDC demo? Is anything going to be missing or disabled? What has been added or improved since then? DFAO, DFGI, Heightfield GI, etc?
Are you planning to release any of the tools you created for managing and cleaning up photos for photogrammetry purposes?
As far as the GDC demo is concerned, which implementations would have to be changed to support multiplayer, I.E features that depend on camera distance/player location.
Any plans to make a runtime version of the foliage tool? Ideal scenario would be chopping down trees(destroying instances) and having new ones grow (slowly).
IIRc The tool did not yet support different models for different stages of growth/age yet, planned?
I noticed the Open World Demo Content Breakdown on Trello, what topics will you be covering? The cell system? The animal AI? Very interested.
I’m hoping you’ll cover your world building workflows, including Epic’s World Machine workflow, while there are tutorials out there already, I imagine Epic has some insights and precise calculations.
(Apologies if much of this has been answered elsewhere, yes I’ve seen the GDC presentation)
Further questions in response to your comments about PIE/Standalone/Shipped differences (which I did appreciate, thank you, and sorry about the lack of specific references-I couldn’t recognize how my issues were occurring because it breaks differently between standalone and shipped).
#1-
You mentioned that only objects that were specifically referenced in the project would be shipped, however when shipping I had errors on blueprints I knew 100% that I wasn’t using anywhere that had no reference to them (when working I tend to duplicate WIP blueprints to make backups of them in-case of issues like accidental infinite loops in construct that require manual deletion of the blueprint in the work folder-so that I have at least got a known functional recent backup).
Does this mean that even though they were being checked for errors when shipping, they still wouldn’t actually be available in the end package?
#2-
Not being a programmer/engine engineer, and not being involved with the engine development, I have absolutely no idea how PIE/standalone/shipped works differently. If I can do something in the editor I expect that I was allowed to do that and I have no clue where the source of any difference could be. Especially when things such as one area of my UMG not showing in standalone, actually worked perfectly in shipped. Does this mean your comments about object references being required just apply to standalone?
If we could have some detailed “This is what you need to do to have things working in standalone/shipped” or some warnings that show in the blueprint editor or somewhere visible in the game engine that would be incredibly appreciated as right now I still have absolutely no idea where I could be going wrong based on the fact what you suggested may be an issue for disappearing UI may be why it’s not showing up in standalone, but then why is it working in shipped-does this mean the issue could be somewhere else?
I’d really like some list of do’s and don’t and solutions to these rather than be expected to anticipate things not working in PIE when there’s no warning and no indication of what said issues could be.
I must say I really like 4.8. The grassType material feature is just awesome.
I’m still missing HeightField GI, or am I mistaken? Would love to use that in combination with my HDRI skylight, since I’m working on a night mission. Any moonlight bounce I can use is welcome
Also, is it me or did the translucent shader get a big improvement? I’m now able to use it in conjunction with screen space reflections. Maybe that was already a thing in 4.7 though, but it didn’t work there for me.
