Currently UE and UEFN is a hard engine to learn for a beginner that doesn’t know gamedev and potentially doesn’t have too much patience due to overload of information. I will explain all the reasons below:
1) Not helpful tooltips.
I 've mentioned this before, but when you hover on a tool you usually should get what that tool/option does in a popup tooltip window. Most of the tooltips in UE/UEFN are explaining the same thing the name of the tool is, or at best just descriptive. They need to show a simple example and also mention what this option is useful for.
Some examples of not useful tooltips:
Photoshop currently has very useful tooltips:
2) Hotkeys are not consistent/missing.
Some buttons have hotkeys, but not others. It would be nice if everything has a hotkey associated with it, even if it means a complex keyboard combination
I love how Blender binds everything to a hotkey, even if one key opens a menu and another executes that setting
3) Documentation in bulk:
Another issue is that its very hard to learn a specific setting, because documentation bundles everything into walls of text. Same with tutorials. All tutorials for UE4/5 features are 10min long+ and they usually go through info in bulks. Would love if documentation is split into chunks and each section explains that setting in great detail, rather than brief details and everything on one page. This is not helpful if you want to go deep into a specific feature.
Unity’s documentation does exactly that and learning Unity is so much easier IMO.
Also Unity’s documentation is so much simpler to navigate, because the titles are much easier to understand:
Unity:
UE5:
“working with audio” >> “AUDIO” so its easier to see. Helps selective readers.
Also the documentation itself is so much slower to load. Devs are impatient people, especially when you tackle with 4 things at the same time. Below is a comparison.
Sometimes I cant see what the section is too (I know I can scroll it to the right, but there is so much empty space between section titles and its not utilized well):
4) Google indexing
When searching for a specific setting in UE4, its very hard to have google come up with what you are looking for, especially because the UE5 documentation result doesn’t mention what you are looking for, it just says “UE5 documentation” and you again get the walls of text that may or may not include what you are looking for. This makes me quit looking at what I want and manually experiment in the engine, until I get tired and stop trying to figure it out. In Unity, what you are looking for always (90%) comes up, in an easily digestable format and a page that loads pretty fast (or YT, but that’s out of your control).
5) Convoluted wording
Documentation is full of convoluted titles and terms in general, makes it really hard for non-UE people to understand what it is talking about. The terms are highly technical and sometimes even weird (for example, don’t expect a newcomer to understand what an “actor” is, or even connect it to what it should mean, because no other medium uses that word to define props and objects, for example)
Another example. If someone wants to understand a specific module of Niagara (which is currently the most searched thing for Niagara), where does he navigate here?
Why not have:
-Intro
-Emission Types
(then straight from Niagara itself):
-Modules
(again from NIagara):
and each page goes in detail what that module does?
The trick to making understandable UI is “can I read/understand it in 3 seconds?”. If it fails that test, it needs to be simpler and split in chunks.
- Lacking Documentation
Sometimes documentation will not provide useful examples that illustrate what a specific term means or what a function/tool does, and in worst of cases they wont even cover what it means (like how relative transformation works, in this page: Blending Multiple Transform Tracks | Unreal Engine Documentation , all you get is a one line sentence that clearly needs an example to be understood)
Having major difficulty learning the engine in general because I always have to watch 1hr seminars about this one tool that I believe I could learn in 5 mins with the right tutor and documentation.