I am not sure what needs to be done to increase participation in the community but for a guy like me that is learning the Engine it is rough going. Most of my questions go unanswered and as I look through the forums I am not alone. I will search for an issue that I am having and I will find questions that are never answered. It has before made me think that another Engine, maybe unity, might be better for my project. I am not saying that Unity is better. For the type of FPS game I am doing Unreal is probably better but what is the point in the better engine if it takes me 5 years to learn it. As an indie shop of 3 guys making a game, that is a hard pill to swallow. I would welcome feedback on the post but I would suggest Epic do something to improve the community. Some ideas:
Have your developers dedicate some number of hours per week answering threads.
Offer badges, sticky stars, merch and so on for community members that prolifically answer questions.
You’ll often find it’s how a question is posed that makes it most likely to get answered.
The main points are
Pictures
Code ( if appropriate )
Low number of words
A lot of people ask very wordy questions with no pictures or code. For example
“I’ve written an AI robot, and it won’t go where I want it to go, even though I spent hours checking the code. And by the way, everything has a strange red light on it.”
Probability of an answer = 0.
All they had to do is drop off the code or a picture, and probably would have gotten answer in 5 mins…
I am as brief as possible and i see lots of unanswered questions that are as well. That doesnt change the result. One could be excused for thinking widespread usage of this engine is done.
Or maybe most people using the engine are busy using the engine, rather than answering questions for free …
As a member of the community, you are of course welcome to help assist the community on your own! Scan the topics, pick a question that you think you know the answer to, and/or can read the documentation about, and then help out with an answer.
You may find that doing this work will both increase your own understanding of the engine, and increase your skill in asking questions that others are able to answer.
Also, I looked for some of your questions to see whether there was something obvious about them.
For example, you got a reasonable answer to the first question in this thread:
Then you got an error message, and followed up with a second question, saying just “I"m getting this error message.”
This turns of answering people for two reasons:
The first question was correctly answered. You should accept the answer. If you have another problem, ask a second question.
The question you asked is “why do I get this error message?” when the answer is literally just “read the error message.”
Again: If you think the community doesn’t answer questions enough, you should, as part of the community, spend some time answering questions! It will help out both you and the community.
I am really not interested in a flamewar. I stated my questions as succinctly as possible and whn the solution dodnt work i said so. And even of you were to dissect my posts successfully and how i violated ypur sense of the correct post, that doesnt change the overall premise. A cursory glance at question tagged posts makes my point clearly.
Just as clearly constructive criticism is not welcome here so i will drop it. My quest for a platform goes on. I have 3 engineers and 2 artists working on a tech demo and we have to choose the right platform that will enable us to be a success, not struggle for a week over slate ui with no chance of getting questions answered.
Consider this: buy a support contract for the $1,500.00 USD per year. It’s like having a pro-level coder in your group, for like $1.50 USD per hour. I’m going that route, once I’ve saved up.
Well, I think that I read that the response time of the support is like 2-4 business days? Anyway, so say that is like 2 questions per week, so roughly 100 questions per year. It’s assumed that the discussion will evolve into more and more difficult/specialist subjects, which would likely take more and more time for support to respond, so maybe the number of questions is more like, say, 75 per year.
My difficult questions relate to the fine control of particle emission in Niagara, texture sampling of 3D grids in Niagara, and hardware ray tracing / making Niagara fluids cast light and shadow.
I’ve been around since 2016 and the entire Epic Games ecosystem changed a lot throughout the years.
The community was fragmented into different social sharing platforms, many people like me were too busy learning how the Engine works from public works of people like Rama to be active here.
Although I’ve an Art Degree focused on digital arts, most of the things I learned is thanks to those who’re still around and you’re calling out.
Maybe you would expect some kind of “treatment” from those users, but you have to keep in mind no one has an obligation to be here spending time helping random people. I can’t speak for them, but I really think they’re around because they actually CARE about this ecosystem, so be humble, kind, and be the change you want to see.
You’ll get plenty of help if you ask extremely simple beginner questions. This is true here and in unity-land.
If you ask questions that involve lengthy troubleshooting or just a large amount of time necessary to read into the problem and try to understand - good luck! Everybody is busy working on their own stuff. With that in mind, I think forums are best for questions like, “how do I do this in the editor?” or “does X thing exist?” Just simple questions people can answer from memory. Getting help with high effort troubleshooting just isn’t a realistic expectation.
It helps to try and make your questions as general as possible. LIke don’t ask, “I’ve got a goblin and an airplane and when the airplane explodes the goblin doesn’t jump. What do i do?”
If you can figure out what the basic issue is and highlight that, like “blueprint dispatch doesn’t seem to register in other actor” then it is much easier for other people to look into your issue. Also, don’t assume anybody knows anything about your project or what you tried already. Spell it out like you are writing a technical manual so no details are missed. Same thing you have to do anyway when you are troubleshooting.
Also, just a bit of reality check - if your team is dependent on forums to complete the game, you have almost zero chance to start with. Forums are a big bonus but you generally get out from them what you put in. It’s definitely not something you can rely upon for a serious production.
I’ve had very few of my questions go unanswered, but I’ve also answered many more than I’ve asked, and I spend quite a bit of time trying to refine my questions down before asking them. Actually, like 90% of the time I end up answering myself that way.
Reddit and Youtube are probably partly to blame for this, as each popular social media with UE content potentially competes with the forums. And on top of that, the fact that the forums are very poorly designed doesn’t help at all.
So overall the current state is probably the worst case scenario.
There is no shame in paying for help. I’m a C++ and OpenGL programmer with decades of experience. Blueprints is not super easy to migrate to. If you need help, it’s because the documentation and tutorials are few and far between.
I dont disagree that forums could be more active, but just check history of the OP.
It’s the type of user who disincentivizes engagement IMO. They ask a question, get an answer, then want you to build the game for them and won’t even attempt to work through errors on their own.
There is no point trying to help person like that because they won’t help themselves. The best you can hope for is that your answer may help somebody else who has more game-making energy, however if the problem is very specific that is not likely.
As for epic developers participating - yes it is a shame but I guess they have no incentive to really and it is a business. They are putting out a lot of tutorials and such though - at least in my case I have not found unreal so difficult to learn. Actually, in my experience, compared to unity, it is vastly easier. That isn’t entirely because of forums and tutorials and such, but mostly because the editor actually works. And you have blueprints.
So, is there stuff to gripe about? Well, I am not losing any productivity with this engine so I don’t have anything personal to gripe about.
Is the OP helping or contributing to problem? Contributing, I think. They ask two questions before complaining about forums, and apparently have never tried to help anybody else? That’s not teamwork that’s going to make any dreams work.
@BIGTIMEMASTER Well that was unfair. I have never asked once for someone to build the game for me. Quite the contrary. I asked specific targeted questions about things that were not documented and only after I spent hours trying to figure them out for myself. As for answering others, I dont have the requisite knowledge as of yet to do so.
But go ahead and flame away if that makes you feel better. I wont reciprocate. Have a nice day.
I said my opinion and now I am going to leave this where it is.
While I would love to have more activity from the engine devs here, most of the questions posted here are simply a waste of their time… Hell a good portion of the questions are simply a waste of everyones time because they are just badly asked questions that don’t provide enough information to actually answer.
Ideally, paid community team members who are technically competent with the engine would monitor the forum for noteworthy questions and send them to the devs as needed for definitive answers. From my understanding this is basically what the UDN is (was?). Unfortunately it’s anyones guess what the UE community team is up to these days.
have you tried asking your regions evangelist?
they seem super helpful when I’ve talked to them. I mean, to make an appointment with them you may want to have more than just like one question, but if you had a handful of questions like that, could get some answers, then you could be the hero to pass it back to broader community.
I imagine there just isn’t much use for them to focus that much on pumping info out for free, as most anybody who will earn money from the engine would probably either be paying for support or have contacts in the know.
I mean, it would be awesome if just like everything we could possibly want to know was just an easy google search away… but it’s not, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t at least a few more avenues that are available.
