Documentation - The Gold Standard

I appreciate how Epic is trying to improve their documentation…seeking feedback and hiring additional staff. Thanks for that! In terms of the gold standard (IMO) of documentation its QT. Just amazing. Take a look at this class documentation: QColor Class | Qt GUI 5.15.11

If Epic could model after QT, game over!

teak

Amazon Lumberyard have API docs better than Crytek’s docs. Not to mention Unreal’s…

Epic did copy the QT gold standard didn’t they? - But just the first part.
Once they got to ‘Detailed Description’, they went back to f’nite testing. :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, it might be worth calling direct attention to the thread, to make sure its seen.
Summon Mikhail Prinke / Jeff Wilson / Richard Hinckley / Tom Shannon (up to you tho).

Epic are definitely hiring technical writers (remote and on-site) for anyone interested.
(epicgames.avature.net is missing quite a few jobs versus myworkdayjobs.com).

Who knows though… Epic have been talking about improving the docs for years (has anything changed much since here). That’s why its so easy to needle them above… :D. I’ve done technical writing as part of consulting. But what I suspect they’re after is heavy lifters with a very precise writing style, in order to prioritize homogeneity or consistency across the docs, so that they’re polished evenly for all platforms and topics. Which is understandable on one level… However, it may also lead to more walls of technical text with a bunch of lifeless pictures on the flip side…

So… Maybe Epic should do the opposite, and instead hire tech / engine people and train them to be technical writers. Why? Well for starters, traditional docs don’t really work anymore in an ever-changing Game-Engine-As -A-Service world. Its more likely a disconnect occurs, plus a massive backlog. It also doesn’t guarantee innovative content. One of the simpler things some Epic docs have and others are missing, are Anim Gifs to get across core points more clearly / visually vs text… But anyway writing docs is hard, and not always fun, as Bruno hints at here

Yes, writing docs is hard and for someone like myself who doesn’t have patience (although I do have to create docs for work!) its no fun… no fun as: I would rather be dipped head first in a vat of hot chicken fat than to create documentation…

teak

Then why not allow a few trusted people who have been around for sometime, enjoy helping, to edit them at the very least, seeing misspelled words and grammatical errors while hardly life altering, is incredibly annoying and distracting for serious harbors of facts which I assume most here are - and more ;())

Absolutely. Qt documentation is the best I’ve ever seen. I had not even once look into the source code, even writing UI by hand(without QtDesigner).

BTW There is difference between Qt and QT :wink: