I hope forum suggestions are allowed here!
It has been bugging me for a while now: We don’t really have an official place to discuss high-level gameplay framework usage, or software architecture, or compartmentalization… Anything related not to a purely coding problem, but rather more broad-ranging issues or ideas.
Things like: “Do I put X functionality into my GameMode?” or “How do I implement this feature in a way that is readable & maintainable?”, “How do I organize my asset loading?”
We do have the C++ and Blueprint filters, but they are mostly on Q&A for specific issues. Occasionally, a good discussion topic pops up, but those are few and far between.
I believe that a huge abandon / failure factor for game dev, is poorly architectured implementations that lead to unmaintainable, unfinished projects. It would be great to have an epic-defined, official location to discuss such issues and prevent them.
I believe there is a demand for it, but even if there isn’t yet, by creating the section people can start thinking about questions or discussion topics. And more importantly, the existence of such a section could introduce beginners to concepts that are a bit more broad-ranging than merely solving each problem sequentially while creating huge amounts of technical debt.
Therefore I would like to suggest the addition of a new filter visible from the forum page Epic Developer Community Forums, under the section “Programming & Scripting”, called “Software Architecture” or just “Architecture”. (Since we are under the programming section there shouldn’t be too much ambiguity that this isn’t archviz)
I am aware that users can define their own tags, but by having an official tag that is visible from the whole forum hierarchy, such rare questions & issues could get centralized under one easy-to-browse location.