Learning UE has been a mixture of fun prototyping and a profound and persistent frustration with the lack of information about necessary features.
While the basics of blueprints and model importing are very clearly communicated through various blog posts and courses, more complex topics are very difficult to learn about.
A lot of the work seems to have been outsourced to users making YouTube videos or writing personal blog posts. They often get things wrong, admit to not knowing the details or teach suboptimal solutions. The information they provide is very useful for beginners but it’s unfortunate that 3rd parties provide more material than the authors of the engine.
How are GameUserSetting configuration files determined for PIE, Standalone and release builds?
Are player controllers destroyed and copied between levels? Are viewports?
Why do packaged empty levels with no content or shading include neural denoising plugins? How can developers ensure a minimal build?
The information is in the source code of the engine and after a fair bit of digging, everything can be figured out. But the process is laborious, confusing and slow.
Unreal Engine is a big and complex beast but that doesn’t mean that the documentation has to be this sparse. This is echoed multiple times over the years by many who use the engine.
Is it possible to improve the API documentation, the control of what is enabled and included, and the overall picture of how the software works under the hood?