Hi, UE5 is making me very excited and I’m really looking to start a new project based on UE5.
I’m an old UE3 user and I’ve used Unity in the past.
Coming back to UE and I immediately feel that there is some obvious stuff that I find very difficult to live without.
Yeah, I have to admit that I never thought that I would miss them until I used Unity so please don’t reject them until you give some considerations.
“Scene” View update in Play mode. Having a Scene view side-by-side with the Game view updating in PIE is immensely useful for debugging. It may hurt performance to update multiple views simultaneously. If that’s the main reason against it, we can make it optional to update Scene View or not.
In UE, it is very difficult to temporarily disable some Actors for testing. I usually delete the Actors and then revert the delete but this is error-prone. I often make mistakes saving the scene without completely reverting or reverting halfway. It seems obvious why it’s very useful and it doesn’t seem all that difficult to support this feature.
“Mute Audio” from the Settings Menu. Sometimes, I want to work quietly not to bother others, but muting audio is hidden deep inside preference right now. There is “Realtime Audio” in the Settings Menu but it doesn’t have an effect from the Editor. Can we bring it out to a more convenient place?
“Package Manager” like import system within the Editor. To import an Asset in UE, often I have to create a new project first and then copy. If there is a version mismatch, I have to create a compatible project, copy, and then delete it manually. This is really inconvenient and we should be able to import Assets directly from the Editor. If there is a version mismatch, display an additional Confirm Dialogbox if you really want to import. But please let us have an option to import or not. This will be useful right now especially because there is no Asset compatible with UE5 and it will be so until the next year.
1: you have the ability to create multiple viewports in UE, in UE5 theres a menu near the perspective tag, click on that and near the bottom you can see the layouts
2:you can hide actors without deleting them in the world outliner, alternatively you can toggle visible in the rendering tag
3: I dig this
4: I also like this. downloading content->create project with said content->merge to my project is a pain a lot of the times, and having a direct import would be fantastic.
For #4 you can tell the launcher where your projects are to have them show up, so for assets that are marked “Add to project” you can tick the box show all projects and add them to UE5 projects, for content marked “Create new project” you can navigate to your vault cache, find the content that’s there, copy the content folder of the stuff you want and merge it with your project. Thats all the launcher does.
@iLLo, I suppose you haven’t used Unity in a meaningful way. I was like you before I used it, so no worries.
I meant to say updating Scene View in real-time during “Play”. This way, I can monitor what’s going on in the scene without leaving the camera and it’s very very annoying.
Hiding Actors and Deactivating Actors are different. Hiding will just hide but it will interact with the rest of the scene. Again, I meant to say Deactivating as if it doesn’t exist in the scene.
Among other things, #2 is causing huge pain for me. To disable an actor temporarily, I have to delete from the scene and revert back and it often causes problems. It seems simple enough and I’m not sure if anyone from Epic watches this thread.
In my opinion, Epic is far better in many ways but one thing Unity is doing better is community support.
There is one popular thread in Unity that has many valuable feedback.
I switched my project recently to UE 5 for a while and deeply feel the same issues, hopefully the Deactivation function will be implemented in the near future!
Oh, wow! interesting. Thanks for the sharing and I’ll give it a try.
Cheers!
UPDATE:
I just gave it a try in UE4. Deactivate seems to work but Activate didn’t work.
Besides, it’s hard to know whether the actor is activated or not from the WorldOutliner and also we should be able to activate/deactivate a folder and its children.
Anyway, I appreciate your efforts and it seems feasible and I hope Epic will implement it into the Editor properly in the near future.
Thanks.
Pressing Deactivate will deactivate the actor fine. And Pressing Activate unhides the actor however, it doesn’t move. My test actor looks like this.
And a strange thing is, pressing Activate on an actor without pressing Deactivate first, will break the actor; the actor will not move as if it’s deactivated.
I think Activate and Deactivate need more sophisticated control, remembering, and restoring states.
I often forget that I have to notify the Rendering thread after a renderer property of an Actor have been modified.
The function also was improved a bit, will check “state” of the actor before modify.
This one should work now on your version of Unreal 4:
Hi, Bruno, I just gave it a try, but unfortunately, it didn’t work. Activating did not turn on the visibility of the children components. I guess it’s pretty close and I’ll probably be able to study the code and fix it myself. I really appreciate it. I wouldn’t know where to begin if weren’t for your help.
In the meantime, I guess it’s easier said than done but it will be much easier to use if…
It would be convenient to Activate/Deactivate multiple actors or on a folder for convenience.
There should be some sort of visual feedback on the world outliner that the actor is deactivated.
Anyway, it’s a great utility and it should be part of the default UE. In my opinion, it is a simple change but very useful. Right now, to Deactivate, we have to Deactivate the Actor and all its children components but in my opinion, deactivating the Actor should implicitly deactivate all its children without explicitly deactivating. It will make Activate/Deactivate much easier. But I guess this will require an additional flag on an Actor and it is something only Epic can do.
You forgot, We can not edit terrain at run-time in Unreal engine, In unity it’s a piece of cake.
I really wanted to have in-game editor where people can sculpt terrains but Epic never listened I hope one day we could have that feature. Using voxels is an overkill.
Lack of this feature honestly puts me to shame in front of my peers who use unity, they see me as a madman for still sticking with Unreal. It’s not a difficult feature to add for Epic even Cryengine had run-time terrain deformation so does lumberyard/O3DE (it’s pretty performance hungry in Cry and Lumberyard but it’s there and that is what matters).
I don’t really miss Unity a lot. The bigest flaw Unreal has is the content folder, users can’t make cleanup and place asset in separate folder in content folder without screwing everything or make unreal crashing. I use to buy a lot of media on marketplace and it’s a pain to have all them in content folder. Another thing, Unreal don’t have C# support, why they don’t create a bridge that will convert C# code to C++. I know that some people use some alternative but I would like to see Epic natively include this.
Wow someone remembers that
Due to the lack of native code access back then it was more of a proof of concept or tech demo rather than being a production-ready tool. To a certain degree it was just meant to show that it was possible with a lot of unrealscript and material magic working together.
Before the Landmass and Water plugins came around the corner for UE4 I was kinda optimistic that maybe something would change with UE5. But seeing how much love these plugins got from Epic I doubt they are just going to replace Landscape. At this point the options are either wait for UEX, use a marketplace asset or roll your own implementation (if you don’t want to use a different engine).
