I love making games as a hobby and been doing it for around 3 yrs now. used some basic engines before related to web and 3d.
i started using unreal engine 4-5 months back and was loving it until i started using blueprints. I don’t understand why can’t they include something basic mechanics which can speed up the entire workflow. Also very less documentation and actual help is available when stuck. Take for example making ai follow character took so long when it’s something that should have been a inbuilt feature? the projectiles part is like taking forever to understand and built.
I don’t want to hate it but I’ve used other basic engines which had all these mechanics inbuilt for a faster workflow. I have no idea on proceeding ahead with this.
Nish is absolutely right.
Unreal basically comes completely empty and each developer has to create everything from scratch all over and over again.
The provided templates and samples are nice, but nothing to really use.
What the community would need is basic stuff you can plug together and modify to youre needs.
Even for a small game you would need to develop the equivalent of e.g. 10 marketplace packs, where each alone takes months to make.
E.g. a Inventory, enemy AI, or a standard landscape material…same for all the other cetegories in the marketplace.
Of course you cant make such modules that fit EVERY game and ALL needs, but i am sure you can do about 80%. Re-using 80% and having to create 20% costomisation is much better than having to create 100%
For example: if Epic would provide a “standard” landscape material that:
solves the usual problems like avoiding reapeating patterns,
has about 12-15 realistic layers, for grass, dirt, sand, snow…with preset textures, so people could use it out of the box.
is build for modification, so people can swap out texture easy
then this would save hundreds of developers time over and over again.
Such modules have to come from Epic, be optimised for performance, be compatible to be pluged together (interoparability e.g. in blueprints, or consistent design in art assets), well documented and updated to the UE releases.
Sorry that I have to say this, but the stuff from the marketplace is not of the above quality, is not compatible, hardly ever documented, and works “somehow” but not optimised.
Are you saying that you want an engine that has tons of assets already created for you?
That would be a very generic engine, and as far as I know one like that doesn’t really exist. The idea is great, but unfortunately I can imagine a world where no one would really take the time to create their own unique assets/code to make a game, and eventually everything would just be extremely generic, to the point where each game would look and feel the same.
You just have to work to make games. You have to design them, code them, create the assets for them, it is just the way it is unfortunately! I’m not sure what you mean by Unreal is essentially empty, it is by far the most feature-rich and sample-packed engine I have come across, and I have tried a lot of engines. You have to admit it at least comes with 100% more useful features than Unity does.
I would argue that these ‘marketplace pack’ equivalents are not something that the engine should include at all. I’ve made 6 or 7 unique inventory systems for various projects, and each has been completely different, with almost nothing that I would be able to copy-paste over. In doing so, I have not felt the need for anything to be provided to me (I can say the same for everything else I have worked on), and I imagine this is the case for many other programmers. The role of an engine should be to provide a workflow where you can develop games, not provide assets or ‘packs’ that can be used in games, no matter how basic. In my opinion, things like the character movement component that we have are about as ‘templated’ as things should get straight out of the engine.
I agree. You can’t make a unique game with copy-paste from other games and the engine is not supposed to prepare a framework for any sort of game you may want to create. Epic has provided a framework that actually include a ton of stuff and all you have to do is connect the dots and add your own framework on top or create your own if you want.
I will use Star Trek as a reference:
You can’t develop a game by sitting on the bridge pressing only the buttons Epic installed. You have to eventually go down into the engine room and get familiar with the engine so you can tweak it and make it do what you want it to do.
In other words if you don’t have a Montgomery Scott (the engineer) on your development team, your game/ship is in for a rough start.
