Hi everyone,
We’d like to give you an update on the Epic Developer Community, and the ongoing or upcoming changes and improvements.
The Epic Developer Community site launched a little over a year ago and we’ve seen a significant increase in activity relative to the Unreal Engine forums pre-launch. Activity across the board has tripled and held steady nearly every month.
Over the last 12 months collectively everyone has contributed 2,500 tutorials, 1,000 snippets, 250,000 profiles, 230,000 forum posts, and over 150 million pageviews. Thank you!
Providing an intuitive and easy-to-use space to share knowledge and help one another is super important to us. As you may have noticed throughout the last couple of months, we are continuously tweaking and improving the site and will continue to actively invest in this.
If you have any input, feedback, requests, or wishes let us know and we will try to integrate it into the plans!
RECENT AND NEAR-FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS
Multi-Application
The biggest change? Epic Games Store, Capturing Reality, and UEFN/Fortnite Creative joined the Developer Community and each has its own space within the greater site, and tutorials or posts can be cross-posted between them all.
We will soon be adding MetaHuman to the lineup, with its own community space.
Documentation
The other major change is UEFN and Fortnite Creative documentation was integrated into the Developer Community in order to create a one-stop shop for all technical info. This will help stimulate creators to engage with the wider community, and share their work and knowledge.
MetaHuman and Unreal Engine will also see their documentation migrated into the site over the next couple of months.
Tutorial Header Changes
To close the gap between documentation and courses or tutorials, the tutorial pages have had a header style change that brings it closer to the styling of documentation.
In the future, we’d like for some courses and tutorials to seamlessly blend with related documentation pages—this is establishing the foundation for that.
Forum Header Changes
We’ve simplified the top of the forum, adding breadcrumbs that make it easier to navigate. We’ve removed the old distinction between Discussions and Q&A that was a remnant of the original Answerhub migration for Unreal Engine. The same breadcrumb approach has also been implemented on Docs, Snippets, and Tutorials for consistency across the board.
New Front Page
For Unreal Engine and UEFN, a new front page went live in March that provides a list of staff-picked cool, popular, or otherwise interesting and inspiring forum threads to help provide visibility to those topics.
Forum User/Display Name Changes
Currently the forum shows the username on every post, rather than showing your Display Name. This takes away from the purpose and benefit of a Display Name and causes inconsistencies across the site. For example, tutorials show your Display Name, not username.
There will be an update for the forum to display your Display Name on posts, and in cases where the username and the Display Name are different, the username will be displayed alongside. This is similar to how sites like Twitter handle it and having the username alongside the post will help to tag other users or identifying imposters.
Forum Category Views
We are going to add the number of Likes on a topic’s OP to show up on the category listing. We are also considering adding a one-line preview of each post within that view. Would that be too noisy or helpful? Would love your input!
FUTURE PLANS
Documentation
The documentation work is our biggest effort right now. Aside from migrating all documentation pages into the Developer Community, we are working on new authoring tools for the internal teams to write the Docs pages.
The new tools will help the team create and update pages more quickly, in turn leading to more complete docs for everyone. It is also the technical foundation for us to explore community contributions to Docs in the future.
Knowledge Base
The current Knowledge Base is a forum plugin and has limitations, such as the UI or our inability to localize it. We are looking at writing our own KB system feature, using the same foundation that Snippets and Tutorials are running on in order to create a more robust KB section.
Search
There are a number of known weaknesses within the site’s search that we are gradually working on.
UI Design
We continue to tweak and iterate on the site’s design. One noteworthy item, we will shift over to a new design language that is an Epic-wide unified and consistent approach to UX for all of our websites and tools. Details are TBD, but it would include tidying up the top nav and similar areas.
Questions/Bugs Forms
We are exploring how to make submitting bugs, questions, or anything else in that vein easier— for example, via a template or form that is embedded into the forum.