Hello!
Here is another Fab development update. There’s lots to get through so let’s jump in:
Search
After having previously integrated Unreal Engine Marketplace and Sketchfab historical data into search rankings, we have now also begun incorporating Fab data into the search weighting. This means that we will now add some influence for recent sales in determining search position.
As before, improving Search remains an ongoing and iterative effort., We are continuing to tweak things, including looking at ways to highlight new content, and using some of the latest search technologies to surface relevant content.
UE and UEFN Integrations
We have brought the editor integrations to parity with the new UX that we launched for Fab.com a few weeks ago.
Also noteworthy is the new “Include 3D Compatible Formats” option in the UE integration
The previous version of the UE Plugin showed only UE assets on the home page and in Discover, but then included other compatible formats while in search, which led to an inconsistent experience that wasn’t very transparent about how it functioned.
The updated editor integrations introduce a number of other fixes, too.
- The scrollbar is wider and easier to click on.
- The left nav now stays in view if the width of the panel is sufficient.
- All categories, rather than just a portion of them, are now visible in the UE plugin.
Comments Threads
We have added the ability to associate forum threads with product listings on Fab as a space for questions, discussions, support, or sharing work that people have made using the products.
Please note that this feature is not a replacement for reviews. We continue to work on the reviews feature that we will be releasing later this year.
During listing creation, publishers can choose to opt in to generating a product-specific forum thread here on the Epic Developer Community.
If you’re a publisher, when your product publishes on Fab, a forum post will automatically be created with you as its author; the title and description of the post will be the same as the title and description from your Fab product listing. Your listing page will link directly to the thread.
UX Quality Of Life Fixes and Improvements
We’re continuing our work to release various miscellaneous UX improvements.
Note that some of the items below are not yet live. Those that haven’t been released yet are close to completion or are in testing, and will be put online soon.
Quick add-to-cart button, currently available for wishlist items, will be added to all for-purchase listings, to make adding items to your cart faster. Set to be live next week.
On Sale link prominently present in the left nav to make it easy to discover. This will be particularly useful when creators are able to host their own sales, so we expect to release it at the same time as individual sales go live (see bottom section of this post).
Local currency display. Currently, product prices are shown in a currency determined by your choice of website language, which is not very reliable.. Soon, the currency displayed will be determined by the location set in your Epic Games account settings, or the location of your IP address if the account setting is unavailable. Set to be live next week.
We’re implementing a notification dot on the wishlist icon to alert you when an item in your wishlist is on sale. Set to be live next week.
You can now sort alphabetically in Search and Discover, but not yet in My Library.
3D Viewer - We’ve introduced first-person navigation controls, as well as the option to make the setting persistent, to reduce context switching between Unreal Engine or Unity, and Fab.
3D Viewer - We moved UI elements to prevent overlap with the media viewer controls.
The account dropdown in the top right corner now displays username, which will help those of you who have multiple accounts to know which account is currently logged in to Fab.
Next Steps & In Progress
Category Improvements
As mentioned in the previous update, we are working on improving the category structure on Fab. The big thing we want to improve is to eliminate overlapping categories, thereby making it easier and less confusing to find what you need.
For example Atlases or Brushes could be found in those categories, but potentially also in 2D Assets; similarly, Environments and Scenes have some overlap. And what is the best place for an Unreal Engine character? Is that a 3D Model - Character, or is that a Smart Asset - Character? All of these kinds of things are causing a good amount of fragmentation of content across a variety of categories. The plan is to consolidate or group a number of different categories so that we get a cleaner and more understandable category tree.
This work is currently in progress and provided everything stays on track, we are aiming for these changes to release during April.
We will post a detailed breakdown of what will be changed ahead of the changes going live, so that publishers have a chance to review them in advance and make any adjustments to their listings.
Tech Details
Once we are through the category work, the next step is to look at how to improve the technical details for each product (things like polycount). Fab does not store this kind of data consistently right now. For example, an Unreal Engine asset captures those types of details differently than a 3D model asset.
We intend to bring it all together into a universal solution, and then once we have that we can extend the Technical Features filter options and provide a way of filtering for things like polycount or texture resolution across a wider set of content.
Performance
We are continuing our efforts to improve the performance of the 3D viewer, as well as the UE5/UEFN Integrations.
On the 3D viewer side we are investigating an issue for machines that have two GPUs, in which the viewer sometimes picks the integrated graphics over the dedicated GPU, as well as exploring how we can better scale the rendering quality based on framerate.
For the editor integrations, we are held back by the way web pages are currently rendered within Slate, which is what is causing the low framerate and sluggish behaviour.
If we render the Fab web pages directly to the GPU, Slate web performance should improve by quite a bit, but this requires an engine change that could only come in at the earliest for UE5.7.
The alternative is to disable the ability for the Fab panel to dock to other Slate panels. If the Fab panel is its own independent panel then we can do native rendering and performance will be much faster. We are currently testing a build and if it holds up, we are thinking that it is ok to sacrifice the docking ability in return for being able to address performance in the plugin in the near future (targeting UE5.6), but if anyone has inputs or thoughts on this let us know down below.
More on this in future updates!
Individual Sales
Next month we will be introducing the ability for publishers to initiate their own individual sales. These sales will give publishers flexibility to put all or a specific set of their products on sale, with discounts set up to 50% off. We’ll share more details on how to kick off an individual sale when this functionality goes live.
Fab in the Epic Games Launcher
And last but definitely not least – work is underway to integrate Fab into the launcher, and offer functionality such as offline mode with support for a server/client workflow, easy exporting through direct integrations with a number of different engines and 3D tools, and more.
This is a large undertaking that is running in parallel to the other work, and the vision is for this to be a solution similar to Quixel Bridge. We will share more details on all of this when we are ready to show everyone a first version!
