I don’t know, if you knew that someone would instantly misreading what you said, then you probably didn’t think your wording through all the way. Yes, I did read what you said. You had very mixed signals on expectations.
You’d be surprised how often pre-planning is an issue for developers… They get a good way through development, then realize they want to add in some new feature to the mix and end up in a hell of refactoring because of it. And as I said, you can figure out how THIS system works by following the code. I don’t care if it comes off as patronizing, I’m not here to delicately address someone so that they don’t feel the slightest bit of discomfort in their lack of understanding in something. If you know how to plan out code beforehand, then you probably understand how hierarchical structures work, which means you can probably figure out how someone else’s system works. It just takes time and effort. The good news is that you only have to do it once, if you’re going to recycle someone else’s work.
Isn’t that the whole point of being a developer? You have to be able to think outside of the box on your own. There isn’t always going to be someone to hold your hand through every nook and cranny of a project. You have to learn to read between the lines and figure things out on your own. Otherwise, you’ll perpetually find yourself in the trap of always needing someone to do your work for you.
If this were the case, then you should have no problem following through UE style syntax and code. It’s not that alien from standard c++ code… It just has a specific setup that’s pretty well outlined in the documentation and examples.
A lot of people actually can do that… You can quickly figure out the basics like the car needs wheels, a steering wheel, chassis, differential, transmission, engine, etc etc. From there, you can apply what you’re supposed to know already and realize that something like a transmission is going to have a set number of gears, with set gearing ratios. The engine is going to need to produce a minimum amount of torque at the wheel to accelerate from 0-60 within a time frame. You engine is going to need cylinders of a certain displacement to produce a certain amount of power, etc etc. This is where your knowledge and degree in a field are supposed to come into play…
Not really, it’s not on them to produce documentation for everything. If you’re going to use some premade asset, most of the time, it’s on you to figure out the blackbox in how it works. Otherwise, you just have to go with it, plug in your inputs, let the blackbox do it’s magic, and run with it’s outputs. Don’t get me wrong though, documentation is nice, it’s just not an entitlement. You should see how poorly some of the other popular engines are documented… UE is pretty decent.
Play around with it, experiment with it, see what does what. It doesn’t really take as long as you’d think.
What’s really ironic is that I have zero official education in game development and am actually an electromechanical engineer, yet I rarely find myself unable to follow through UE code to figure out what’s doing what… Sometimes, it might take a little bit to truly peck through it all, but it’s all pretty simple and self explanatory. Even in the actual engine code, there is usually plenty of annotation. Hell, even in the example blueprints, they usually try to comment things out…