The marketplace is in it’s infancy, so I’m not going to trash talk it; what I’d really like is to talk about some of the ways the editor to support communication between marketplace creators and their customers, and by virtue of improving these tools make UE4 a better multi-user experience.
Firstly, the text support is horrible; just try to write a comment about something in a blueprint and you are limited to only seeing a few words and have to type blindly and wait until you press enter to accept your text input. This is just totally not up to parity with beautiful way the blueprint ommits ‘b’ in bFiring, or UMG or most of the work put into the editor. There is also no text editor, from the perspective of Epic not wanting to support an in-editor IDE I get it, but at least give us the ability to edit and view normal text files and then (of course) let us mirror those text files into comments or leave notes for other developers via the content browser. Clearly nobody has looked at the text-input text for ever and it would take a week to get some already busy limited super-nerd-hamster to run on a different wheel for a few weeks but I think this would be a great idea, because…
Secondly, We have like the most advanced graph and grid presentation under our finger-tips, a huge problem already with in-engine cross-developer communication and it’s like, why don’t we have just one more graph window that allows us communicate via graphs (or you know we could just move forward in life connecting a bunch of random reroute and branch nodes through commented sections of in-executable blueprints.
But wait!!.. there’s more!. The tutorials system is sometimes hit, but usually miss; I think I’ve made heads and tails of it but then find out something only worked because of something else I already had open, now when I click on it it wants to open visual studio (I have no idea why it would want to do that on a 100% Blueprint project) and googling “UE4 tutorials” returns every thing. No body get’s up (other than me) in the mornings and thinks about great it would be to make sweet things with the UE4 tutorials system, just sit anyone who hasn’t used it before and do a UX study.
Finally developers need clear directions, Blueprints provides an easy ramp up into the UE4 API for new and veteran programmers, most Marketplace content could and should be wrapped in a Blueprint interface, clearly showing what changes are and are not supported, problems with the blueprint enumeration class (requiring re-work and corrupting blueprints) coupled with the fore-mentioned problems make cross-developer work difficult. We need a clear and open preference by UE4 developers themselves that logic should be sent to component classes when possible and beyond the basic object-actor-pawn-character/wheeled vehicle classes should be avoided.
In the future of UE4 we are talking about the greatest artists personally creating their own games with completely reliant on a decent set of standards, conversely; right now we are limited to people in the “jobs” section paying experianced programmers and blueprints to tell them why Project-A can’t be ripped and put into Project-B. There are no guidelines between say Allar’s generic shooter and “quick and easy’s” weapon component system, both great both great systems but one is like a modular piece and the other a complete game framework. (and a lot of the devs are stressed and recieving difficult e-mails between the people who are and arn’t asking for fair support), even a color coding high-light system world work well for developer communication.
Game-development is all the same, it’s about striking that crucial balance between modular content, when you are creating a level you want those modular pieces to fill up the “corridors” of your levels, but also want those curvy unique pieces in the “dungeons” of your game, allowing the player to experience a few one-off, level dependent environment pieces. I don’t need black-magick from the UE4 editor, even if txt files show up in the content browser and just open notepad, we need SOMETHING, even just improve the basic input for comment descriptions.
I know what’s been going on, we are all connected telepathically through the lazy-gaze of the indifferent creator of worlds, Azathoth; so I’m feeling y’all, but these systems need improvement; because UE4 is going to be around in 30-years whether that means it only has a cult following or stays number one is really due to our determination to make those risky changes like tinkering with the mostly working slate code to get better results.