Hi, I’ll try my best not to rant but I’m incredibly frustrated.
I’m working on my first marketplace plugin, which I will then sell, making money for myself and for Epic Games. So it’s in both mine and Epic’s best interest that I finish making it, right?
I have set up my seller account, had it verified and I’m ready to submit my plugin for review.
But there are 2 issues holding me back from finishing my work, and one of them is ESSENTIAL that I solve. I have spent a few months on and off researching the issues over and over, trying different solutions but not found something that works.
How do I get the help I need to finish my work?
I don’t know of a way to just write and ask Epic Games for help.
I don’t have access to UDN, where all the top-level developers hang and where the professional support is available.
All I have are the free community forums, and my experience with asking for help in the official and unofficial forums and question hubs over the past several years has been very frustrating.
There are very helpful people on these places, but the majority is low/mid tier users who are themselves still learning fundamentals like me, and it often comes down to guesswork.
Unreal Engine was made free to use, but up until that point all the support available had been behind closed doors.
Now, after several years, there is STILL things like UDN…
IT BLOWS MY MIND.
Why put the best of the best developers, together with active support staff, in a dedicated group together where the information they share between each other is locked off to the rest of your users?
Not enough is done to help anyone with anything that is above beginner content.
Making an example project like Lyra that is a culmination of all recent best practices and top tier features, and just telling people to “go look at the code” is not as helpful as you seem to think.
If I don’t know how an engine feature works, I cannot reverse engineer your implementation because I don’t have a starting point.
Recording a 4 hour dev stream going over how to use a certain feature is not a good way to offer support. Returning to a very long video and scrolling through it to look for certain places where you remember there was a thing about how to do the stuff is pure frustration.
Spend those 4 hours, + the initial time it took to prepare the projects and assets on just EXTENDING THE DOCUMENTATION so that people can find the information they are looking for in written text with actual code samples.
I’ve never worked with anyone who is NOT frustrated with the extremely low quality of the official Unreal Engine documentation.
To summarize this into feedback:
Not enough is done to teach your users how to use mid/high tier engine functionality.
UDN is not the answer, 4 hour dev streams is not the answer and “go look at the code” is not the answer.