“Epic Games Pushes DEI in Unreal Engine Docs and Gets MOCKED Fiercely!”
Is this true or fake news? If true, will it affect game developers that just use the UE (not Epic internal devs that develop the UE?).
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Not really sure why this is making the rounds now, it’s not something that is a recent change.
The actual changes to the coding standards are true. The outrage is just ridiculous.
No. The document that is referenced is the Coding Standards that Epic uses for it’s own development of the engine. There are no requirements that anyone else follow those standards for anything they are writing or games that they publish with using the engine. Even publishing your game on the Epic Game Store doesn’t involve a review of code that this would apply to.
Caveat One: If you do pull requests through github to try and get a change made to the Engine, that change is expected to conform to Epic’s coding/style guide.
Caveat Two (maybe?): When publishing plugins to the market place, you may have to follow those guidelines but I’m not sure. I don’t recall ever hearing about any sort of code/blueprint review to put anything in the marketplace but it depends on those specific terms.
In most cases, the sorts of things that this is calling out usually make for better names by recognizing wording that only works for a specific cultural norm (which may or may not also be harmful).
Epic’s not really breaking any ground here. There has been a general push in the last 5-10 years to move away from words like “blacklist”, “whitelist”, “master” & “slave” across the tech industry. Epic just happens to be a highly visible step in that direction.
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Thank you very much for the response.
It clarifies things.
As to where the outrage comes from now. I think it started with some sites reporting this and some famous streamers and channels commenting on it as well.
Then a lot of people started expressing their fears and suspicions that Epic will try to enforce this on the gamedevs/studios using the Engine (not just the ones contributing to UE but everyone).
I won’t comment if the standard and the changes in it are appropriate or not, good or bad as this topic is very controversial for many people.
As long as it is ONLY for Epic’s code that is the engine itself, as you confirm, then it is up to Epic to decide.
I think a lot of the turmoil that happened around this topic in the last 1-2 days is because people are afraid of future tries, by Epic, this to be pushed to others own code, their games, and are concerned if they should continue using UE as many people also are now voicing vs. buying games made with UE, because they view that kind of steps as pushing an agenda that not all might like or think is necessary.
Again, I am just explaining what my observations are, and trying to answer your questions why this is making rounds now.
That’s why I came here to ask and receive proper information from the source 
instead of wondering around on the forums/channels/streams where, as you might imagine a lot of misinformation may happen as if tomorrow Epic will start busting our code to enforce their standards.
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Well, they probably don’t understand the game development process. Epic has no (and is incapable of having) any visibility into the codebases behind the games released with their engine.
They would have to update their terms of service and that is something that wouldn’t go over very well with developers. It might not be received quite as poorly as the per-install fee that Unity tried, but it wouldn’t go over very well.
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What a relief to read this answer.
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