I am not justifying epic by this post. Documentation of unreal bigger than some other engines and I don’t think it is bad as such. I have gone through the documentation of multiple game engines and they too have some of these issues. They too are not complete, even ones without source code. But they option for feedback for each page. This feature existed in a limited form in the documentation pages before, but now its just a links to the forums documentation feedback page.
Documentation is only introduction into the engine. Even the advanced topics that is mentions in documentation are just essential thing that one specializing in that department should know. Documentation will never be able to cover every thing this engine can do. So after studying the documentation the most viable option is to look at the source code/c++ headers, its a common practice in many softwares.
UE is evolving in such a pace that external developers who work in with engine source find it difficult to keep up with the momentum. So for anything as big, changing, and multi platform like unreal Engine it is very hard to keep documentation updated even with a dedicated team.
Because of this for some part of the documentation does not work if instruction are followed to the word. In some places some steps are left out by mistakes, things exactly as mentioned in documentation things will not work. In some advanced c++ sections there are errors.
How and what to improve?
- Without the some help of community the documentation team will not be able keep documentation in prime condition.
- All other game engines and even micro.soft are willing to get correction from the community on documentation. Not accepting or ignoring this can might be NIH.
- Give a voting system like “Is this page helpful?”
- At the end of each page have a section with links like “Report page Issue” “Feedback” “Help improve this page”
- The documentation system really need an overhaul like you did for the forum the discourse. Present system is not up to today’s standard.
- There were hundreds of request to have an offline documentation which was ignored always as not priority at the moment. Users are not asking you to write a new offline documentation, just option to have offline copy of the online documentation. There are many means to give the preset documentation offline. With doc system upgrade this even easier to give.