Fab Development Update March 26 - Comments threads, UE Plugin & UX updates, and more

[Hourences]

Thanks for all the feedback and replies!

@Nerwy

I wonder why written reviews seems so low priority for you though. “later this year” seems very very far for a feature so important and that has been massively requested since FAB launch

Yes you are right, and we would love to get to those as soon as we can. The delay there is in part due to us having prioritized search and general UX/usability first because that affects the widest possible audience, and in part due to additional complexity surrounding text reviews

For full transparency, all of the items we’ve been pushing out in this and previous updates are things that we as a dev team can work on directly and independently of other teams at Epic, which means we can go reasonably fast and have a good idea of when we think we’d have what ready.

But text reviews are different. That one requires collaboration with a range of teams at Epic and considerations that go beyond our team. There are quite some regulations around this we need to take into account, we need to ensure moderation works well for it, and it was requested that if we build a text review system it should ideally be built in a way that it is a shared service and that its backend that could work across Epic, if in the future some other part of the company would also like to use it. All of these things are important, but it does make it a more complex project and requires us to sync up with a range of other teams, and that is what you are picking up on.

That said, we are going forward with Text Reviews, and we will try to go as fast as we can.

@Maciek_Leto

When users need a character, they prioritize a nice looking 3D model. If this model is animated or not is much less important.
Users can’t thoroughly search for characters because half of them are inside 3D models>Characters and the other half in Smart Assets>Characters.

We require a separate Characters category, with all Characters inside, where users can optionally filter for already animated characters or not.

Yeah, we want to remove Smart Assets, and merge its content into the other overlapping categories, such as 3D Models - Characters. Likewise for other similar cases. And that will create more distance between each category, to make it clearer what should go where.
Once we did that, we will have the complex task of cleaning up the categories further and find those products that are in the wrong places, because yes there are many of these.

@Blissful_Bishop

I appreciate the ongoing work to improve Fab search rankings and understand that recent sales should play a significant role—this makes sense, and I wholeheartedly agree! I can see this in action, as assets that were bought recently are receiving a nice boost. However, I’ve noticed that older sales data from Fab doesn’t seem to be weighted as much as the historical sales imported from Sketchfab and UEM.

I will chat with the team about the specifics of the current weighting but the position in search depends on a set of variables, including but not limited to the past/current sales data. It might be that something else is causing the difference you are seeing too. If you tell me your two examples and what you used to search for, happy to take a look at it.

@all4me

There should be a separate category for characters with Unreal and Unity projects, like it used to be on the Unreal Marketplace. I would actually remove smart assets altogether and just keep it the way it was on the Unreal Marketplace. You go into the “Assets for Unreal” category and then choose environments, characters, plugins, etc.

Yeah we want to remove Smart Assets, but separate categories for UE and Unity will be difficult, as you may want to be able to offer multiple formats for the same character. We need to keep the categories agnostic of format therefore.

@Laflian

I support the idea of keeping Marketplace and Sketchfab characters separate. And creating an “Assets for Unreal” category. I recently uploaded my new character and it can’t be found in the marketplace. Previously, selecting a character category always showed all new characters on the first page. Bring back the “newest” sorting option for default.

@sdkwarrior

Something needs to be done with the “new asset”. Sketchub or AI creators will not give a chance to those who make projects like on Marketplace. You can set a filter - new - Unreal projects by default!))

@dariichekh

3D Models overall is very frustrating even for a little browsing due to a huge number of low quality assets or ton ai assets that are often are not market as ai generated.

Totally hear everyone on this, but it is complex to tackle properly. Sorting by newest will not help for any of the larger categories as you’d see a lot of random content of various levels of quality that way. And we already have a UE channel that shows only UE content too in case you want to filter out all of the other content.

There are things to explore we have not yet gotten to, for example we could add a relevancy ranking weight that operates at a publisher level. Look at ratings, downloads and other such stats across all products a publisher has, and then apply a boost to any new products they have based on that.

We will look deeper into this once we are through some other items, but I hope that the UE channel does provide that more focused view already?