A few things;
First, basic browser controls are not handled. It would greatly improve the user experience if;
Page up/down behaved as expected.
Combo boxes shifted so that they don’t “roll out” off the bottom of the window.
My main gripe, though, is the Unreal Engine > Library pane’s handling of items with updates. I have a lot of things in my library at this point and scrolling through hundreds of entries looking for that orange dot is sub-optimal. I have two ways that would work to correct this:
Add a hideable pane at the top of the content library section (below projects), place items with updates in this pane and show the pane if any items are present.
Sort items with updates to the top of the list before sorting the rest of the list.
Which to use would naturally depend on complexity - I think tweaking sorting would be quickest to implement, personally.
So the “question” here is this: how likely are these improvements to ever be implemented? I don’t feel like it’s asking a lot but I don’t know what size the team is or how much other stuff gets piled on them.
Honestly, they should break out the portions that handle connecting to their services and open source the rest. We in the community could really spiff the UI up and probably fix a few performance issues while we’re at it. The way it is now it’s one of those “ugh… well, good thing I only actually use it once in a while” things.
The main problem is that the epic games launcher is running on Unreal’s slate tech. Look inside the the Epic Games \ Launcher folder and you’ll notice that it’s a watered down version of unreal engine.
UE is running what should be a lightweight web tech with rest communication, that’s why it’s so sluggish.
You’re right, but sluggishness is only part of the problem. I’d be fine with it if all panes in the tool behaved like a browser pane should but expected controls for browser panes and collection controls are not implemented, or are implemented inconsistently. And as I mentioned before, the orange “charm” to indicate updates is horrible if you have more than a few dozen items in your library. Items with updates really should either be sorted to the top of the pane or added to a separate list control.
2 months ago the the Unreal Live chat rep said they were going to fix this…surely with all these great features they add into unreal, they must be able to figure out how to add a “needs update” filter to the assets.