I’ll be as clear as possible. World Outliner at the moment is pure garbage. It fails in giving users any help at all, lacking ALL of the modern solutions that are best practice almost everywhere else.
Folders are useless: they are not physical objects, thus can’t be used to manage their children. They can indeed group objects inside, but their purpose ends here;
Nesting is useless: even when parenting something to something else, it can’t be duplicated and/or instanced without actually selecting it in advance, defying the very meaning of objects nesting management;
Lacking all the above, dropping an object from content browser directly in the World Outliner, maybe just inside its final folder, is impossible and moreover useless atm;
Custom sorting in the World Outliner is impossible: everything is stuck at alphabetical order, making impossible to swiftly organize the hierarchy;
Folders randomly uncollapse freely, driving me crazy each time.
All of this adds to the nonexistent prefab system, making me use blueprints instead even for static stuff. Blueprints that, moreover, lacks of some precise space management inside them and reset their transform on duplicate in the level.
I’m more than stunned about the fact that no one along the years ever pointed out these terrible issues of the most famous game engine in the world. This is matter of QoL updates for devs, that should be top priority, even over the last graphical improvements (or, just to make an example, the nonsense poly modeler lastly advertised for UE5. Come on, that is your priority? Really?)
What I saw in devs’ communities is that few people actually care about World Outliner (or hierarchy, or whatever you may call it) because most devs just don’t realize how useful an organized level structure is. So, it may be true that in this forum people don’t care anymore, still I really couldn’t find anything searching for it here.
This is actually something even I did, back when I developed things with UE3, they’re common practices that unfortunately can’t really solve any of the world outliner issues.
Can’t say that I agree. Fortnite is far from the “most famous game”, though is among the top tier, while the engine itself is probably something every dev would work on. Before they actually can try it.
Probably the only thing I agree with. I really didn’t hope for any feedback from Epic here, just trying to make people a little bit more aware of something they probably get used to, as you said, forgetting that better tools means completing tasks faster too.
By the way I strongly agree with the original post here. The Outliner is borderline useless. The funniest is copying a folder - it does exactly that. Copies the FOLDER, but NOT ITS CONTENT. It makes an empty folder with the same name. That’s what copying a folder means in Unreal. Ridiculous. Nesting is useless in much the same way. The fixed (alphabetical) order is just the cherry on top.
Please, do something about this. (Please… Is anyone there?..)
@eobet Ctrl-Shift-D still works (and you can change the shortcut). But the button is gone. Interestingly, it’s still there with folders (right click - select - all descendants).
I think they have just erased my comment with the excuse of “”“adult”"" language. So, I will repeat the whole thing, but with the word “duck”.
I still feel AntiGravity is right because they don’t give two flying ducks about us.
Dude, oh, yeah, you are absolutely a genius, dude! Best idea ever. How come I didn’t think of that, dude. Why don’t we just rewrite Unreal? Dude, being so smart, why don’t we fuse Unreal and Unity into UnUnity. We will be rich, dude. Dude, you have just solved all our problems. Thank you, dude.
I was about to be very rude, but instead I will kindly ask you to help us on this, then.
That way, we can see if you are here just to add noise, to advertise or to help.
World Outliner is utter crap. I cannot believe it’s that bad. It takes so much time doing repetitive basic things, instead of doing valuable work. jesus fcking christ, EPIC do something about it, please!
It’s out of this world how bad this is, even small level is really irritating to work with because of this piece of s#%t. I love UE 5, but this is just outrageous. If you EPIC guys need some examples on how to do it just look anywhere it’s there. Anything would be better than this 90’s c#&p.
Folders have been updated to support One File Per Actor (OFPA), but that hasn’t brought additional features yet. That said, now that they’re actual objects the team suggested we’ll be able to add new properties and features to the folders.
Actor Folders are default for World Partition levels, but experimental on non-World Partition levels, but working:
To enable it, update the flag in EditorExperimentalSettings called “Enable Actor Folder Object Support”
Nesting is still purely meant as a means of attachment to move items together and there aren’t plans to change that at this time.
I asked the team about dragging content from the Content Browser to the Outliner, and the short answer is “it’s complicated”. The Outliner only supports actors, but drag/drop operations can result in more than a new actor, so there’d be a lot of undefined UX.
Ex: What happens if you drop a material on top of an actor in the outliner? Does it apply the material to the actor? How does the user know? Do we force it into focus?—the list goes on.
That said, they’d be happy to dig in. If you’d like to share what types of editing you’re trying to do or more about your workflows, we can pass that along!
Sorting should be improved with a filter bar, similar to the Content Browser’s, that’s coming as part of the 5.1 release. They’re also adding Search History and Saved Searches.
Short answer is: check how Unity’s Hierarchy works and copy it.
Regarding world building and high level scene management, Unity’s Hierarchy, the equivalent of Unreal’s World Outliner, is light years ahead.
The following are what I’m missing the most in Unreal, switching from Unity:
Hierarchy’s empty helpers: empty objects that helps to precisely transform actors just by nesting them. The children actors can be reset to neutral loc/rot/scale that become the same of the parent empty object. Also, script components placed in the empty parent can work on children too. All of this directly in the hierarchy, without making a new prefab first each time. At the very least, if folders must act as as an empty helper, duplicating a folder must duplicate everything it contains too
Hierarchy’s custom reordering: not by a filter, but actually by dragging and dropping objects to a new spot in the list
dropping objects directly from content browser to the world outliner: not only good from an housekeeping point of view, but also to directly place in a specific, preset spot an actor (i.e.: I have a “room” empty object in the scene and the pivots of the room’s walls I’m going to drop from the content browser snap with the one of the empty parent I will place them into)
dropping materials and meshes on an actor in the hierarchy directly from the content browser is a nice feature, surely not vital but, again, that Unity has. They solved the problem, I’m sure you can do it too, though this is really not a so important matter compared to the others
They said we do have empty actors, so that might be a start for now. But I’ve captured your feedback and sent it over—they’re plotting out future changes and this is helpful!
It would be nice if parented actors could also remember if the outliner view was expanded or not when reopening the level. Currently folders stay closed if they were closed when the level was last saved, but the parented actors do not, even though the hierarchy is visually indicated very similarly.
Editing multiple objects is a pain, you cannot select a component to change its properties from the component list when multiple actors are selected, even if all the actors are the same when it comes to their components. It can be tricky to determine I guess though since you can add and remove components from instances. One can always make instance editable parameters in the actor class to control component properties.
Grouping is just… meh. The group actor clutters the outliner. It’s moved out of the way by default (but this also moves it away from the grouped actors). Grouping feels like a way to manage some visual-only small clutter, for that the selection box can be nice, otherwise, I’d use the other means.
Personally I just try to pack bigger level elements that logically go together into big dumb prefab-esque blueprints, also resorted to using scripts to spawning actors where patterns are found (EditorPostEditChangeProperty is nice with that) which also neatly allows me to parent the generated actors to whatever created them. Which is where it would be nice if all child object hierarchies wouldn’t be exploded when opening a level.
I can’t manage to find “invert selection” in UE5 anymore. It was right there next to the “select all descendants” they also removed, so where did they move “invert selection”? Surely that must be used even more often?
What the heck are the UX people at Epic doing these days? I feel as if I’m being trolled, honestly…
