A good day (or night) to everyone reading this, I am a game/XR developer and an AI developer and it’s recently come to my attention about a few different features that I—and hopefully some of you—would love to have in the engine. Now if any of these do already exist and I simply just never found them, please reply with your solutions and answers.
Starting off with things in the field of AI, I noticed that the game engine Unity has something called “Unity Machine Learning Agents” where users can program, train, and implement reinforcement learning algorithms using Python and Unity. These RL models can then be implemented into games as truly intelligent NPCs and enemies, and can be used in many other differing scenarios. Now turning back to my engine of choice Unreal (of course), I see that no such thing exists where we can code an RL model using Python (making use of libraries such as Tensorflow and PyTorch) and directly add and make use of it in the engine. A feature like this could be revolutionary to both the gaming industry and AI industry.
Next I would like to request a few features that I as a VR developer would appreciate having. The first being a way to apply hand tracking (using OpenXR) seamlessly into the engine. And this shouldn’t be another solution that works in-engine, but not when finally packaging the game. It would also be amazing if lumen and nanite were more optimized for VR and would come by default in the VR Template without needing to change anything in the project settings.
Finally, I wanted to mention the lack of customizability in the Metahuman Creator. I’ve heard about the new AI Tafi is developing (Tafi Avatar) and believe that Metahumans can also streamlined and customizable. I believe in Metahumans, but they need to have a superior level of customizability—which includes having a MUCH bigger library of clothes to choose from. We need more fantasy, more sci-fi, more everything, and if not, we need an easier and more efficient way to create clothes (or buy them off the marketplace) and add them without hassle.
In the case that any of you actually read through this feature recommendation, I owe you a thanks and I hope we will be seeing these features in the 5.3 release of the engine. As I had said before, if there is a way to do any of this that I haven’t found, please leave it in the replies.