[Feedback] My next round of Content/Editor Feedback/minor bugs

After wrapping up some other work, I recently managed to get back to Rocket and this is the first time I a.) used the latest build b.) tried to [produce something production ready (link)][1] I hit following things doing so:

Moving with shortcuts

Since the very start of Unreal you were able to first click a mouse button, and then ctrl/shift/ctrl+shift to move the object you had selected. Now however since the latest build you need to rigidly first press the keyboard key, and then use the mouse, or you cannot move anything. Since you are going to be working at high speed and changing back and forth rapidly between navigating the viewport and moving objects, the need for having it follow this rigid order is causing slow downs in my workflow and make for a frustrating experience. I understand that features may need updating and so on after so many years, but this is a change that does not seem like it could possibly improve anything? Can the original UE1/2/3 system return, or at the very least an option for it? The way it has been for the past 15 years was nice and fluent, requiring minimal breaks in the continuous move camera-move object rhythm.

Texture Editor

Set a channel to then Red channel only, then deactivate the Saturation button => Shows red channel in red color, even though saturation is off. Now enable Saturation => Now shows solid red color filling the entire window, which is entirely useless.
I’d like to have UE3 behavior here, where it would made each channel grayscale (as expected) when saturation is disabled. I use a lot of mergemaps, I find it difficult to judge them when they are colored.

Meshes in Content Browser

I cannot see the size (file size) of a mesh. Neither in the content browser in the pop up box that appears when hovering over a mesh or in the top left corner Staticmesh Editor window. This was present on both places in UE3. Can these two locations not show the file size again like in UE3?

Importing Meshes - no Yes to all

When importing SM, it pops up the import dialog for each mesh. There is no Import All. I just imported 50 meshes, and had to press “ok” 50 times in a row.

Content Browser Filters Reset

Every time I make a new asset, for example a material, it resets my filters, causing me to set them again time after time.

Snapping Distance

I would like a much much bigger snapping distance available. The current maximum range only works with small objects, but if you are dragging entire buildings around it is impossible to get it to snap. A snap range of 1 to 65536 units or such would be ideal.

Alignment Colors

The majority of time I spend building levels is aligning things. I brought this up before as well and offered various suggestions there, here is one more. Would it be possible to color code the orange line that surrounds the selected mesh? Currently it is always orange, however if you’d do the following:

Then it would make it far easier to see how the mesh has been placed.

If you are located relatively far away from a mesh and you move it, it can be hard to see if it aligns or not from a distance. You could obviously move closer, but this costs time. Being able to have more visual feedback from a distance would be helpful. On a full production work day I move objects many thousands of times, even the smallest speed improvement adds up a lot over the course of a whole project.
If you are going through a level done by someone else, this feature would make it easy for you to go through and click through the level to find overlapping or badly placed (placed without grid, wrong scales, etc. - this concerns modular mesh workflow) meshes because you’d have visual feedback that instantly shows you if A.) mesh is aligned correctly B.) Overlapping C.) not touching anything/floating. Which are the three states a placed environment mesh can be in.

Icon Translucency Rendering

The sprite icons in UE4 render behind translucent meshes, thus making them stand out less. Following screenshot shows light and reflection actors positioned well in front of a translucent fog plane. However the fog plane is rendering on top of the icons, making them blend in. This makes the editor less readable.

Location in Component Editor

Dragging the values found there clamps it at 0, so you cannot offset something below 0 by dragging, only by typing. Very minor thing, just pointing it out.

Accept Lights Property

I have a mesh that only uses an unlit material and thus should have Accept Lights false. However Accept Lights is no longer anywhere in the properties. What should I do? I do not want the engine to waste a lightmap on this mesh. A similar situation would be when I have a mesh that is invisible in game, I would not want that to receive lighting either. Does the engine automatically fix this, or is this a forgotten feature?

Right ok, I didn’t want to flood the page. I will repost later/tomorrow

The green adjacent/red overlap idea is good. Not sure how it could be calculated though… As I recall, 3ds Max STL Check(?) can find faces that rub against each other in the same object (normally a bad thing). But for multiple different objects it’d be maybe a good thing. Then again, why not just have an align to face tool kind of like Photoshop aligns (or 3ds Max’s Transform Toolbox) with a keep orientation option and a rotate to normal option. A freeform FFD2x2x2 would also be great to slightly stretch meshes based on their bounds.

A FFD has been on my wishlist for many years, and I’ve kind of given up on it already, but yeah would be incredibly useful.

Align to face doesn’t always work as it may need to connect to an open edge. Ideally a fully featured snap-to-whatever tool similar to Max would work best. I requested something like that a few months ago.

Hi Sjoerd,

Thank you very much for your feedback! Unfortunately, since this is several different issues and I have to assign several different people to answer, it will need to be separated into individual questions. If you could please submit these one-at-a-time it will allow for faster response and easier tracking on our side.

Thank you for your understanding,

Alexander.