No, but today’s music production software can do so much for you that you don’t even need to know a thing about music. I appreciate the visual scripting and things like that, but it just seems to me like some of this could be made easier to understand than it is. I’m keeping at it. Here is what I did with cryengine after a couple of days:
I haven’t used CryEngine myself, I’ve booted it up and that was about it. I will say, however, that I’ve played around with other game engines and there’s no denying the complexity of Unreal Engine compared to others. Epic has moved in the right direction, with UE4, to try and make things much more transparent and take away some of the obfuscation of the engine. By releasing the source code to all public parties, they’ve allowed us to dive deep into the engine components to view how things actually work. Material editing is much more “plaintext” now compared to UE3, and Kismet - now called Blueprint feels like it actually belongs in the engine, and is much easier to get a grasp on. UnrealScript has been thrown away, thank god. Epic has setup a Stack Overflow-like Q&A site called AnswerHub that is great for any specification questions that you have, and have released some great tutorial videos and demos to go along with the release of the engine.
One thing that shouldn’t be downplayed is that UE4 has only been released to the public for about a week now, most everyone is still learning all the bells and whistles that Epic has tucked away within the engine and getting used to it themselves. Community documentation/tutorials will come with time as the community discovers new things. If you look at UE3, you could probably find hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of tutorials created by the community over pretty much every subject.
What the complexity of UE4 is though, is overshadowed by the depth of control that you have over your project compared to other engines. No engine that I’ve seen comparatively gives you that much control, thus UE being more complex.