How do you find working with UE4?

[anonymous_user_bcf66e2c]

The below is going to sound very fanboyish, and I understand that compared to some, I seem to have had a very smooth experience. I rarely experience any kind of crash unless its caused by me (But this could also be that I don’t use rely on blueprints, except to prototype), and I find performance to be very good, but then again I am building a game for the next gen of GPU’s.

@AusPaco;303884

What is your general experience level with programming, as well as UE4 (are you a professional coder? hobbyist? Used UE4 before?)

I have around 15 years experience in programming, am a professional programmer.

@AusPaco;303884

How easy has it been to find information? How useful is the official documentation? What do you think of AnswerHub vs forum? How much time have you spent reverse engineering the source code to figure things out?

I dont tend to use the documentation very much at all, this is not due to it being incomplete or missing or anything, I just find it easier to look through the existing code base to learn how things work. I only really use answerhub with issues I cannot solve myself. I have no qualms with modifying the engine source to resolve any issues I run into.

@AusPaco;303884

Bugs - Have you found any? How does it compare to other software.

Of course just like any other piece of software, I have ran into bugs, but not like other pieces of software I have used, I can fix these myself, which I generally end up doing.

@AusPaco;303884

Updates - have they been a pain due to breaking changes, or generally good due to better features?

4.7 was a bit of a hiccup for me, having a project that I have been running since 4.2. It has been smooth transitions till I hit 4.7 when I had a few fairly sizable issues occur that were also very hard to reproduce to show Epic. 4.8 has mostly solved these for me, and that was a fairly smooth transition.

@AusPaco;303884

Productivity - From a coders perspective, do you find you make reasonable progress? Do you find yourself taking longer/shorter to get things done vs other engines?

I have my good days and my bad days, just like anything else. Since I make a lot of engine modifications, I tend to find myself sitting there waiting for compilation to finish. Modify one entry in a header and then wait 20min for the compile to finish. But thats what I get for modifying the engine. Most of my game changes occur pretty quickly. My game is about 90% C++ and 10% blueprints at this point.

@AusPaco;303884

General Pros and Cons - What have you loved or hated? How have you found the experience?

I have found the experience great, I have been wishing for a full source engine of this calibre for a long time, using UDK I always found myself hitting limitations that I could not work around. Now all those limitations have fallen down, and I can really do what I need to do. Obviously there are cons to go with this, but a lot of them I end up fixing myself. ie. For loops/Texture arrays in the material editor (Solved). And sometimes I just wish the code base was a little more commented so that I can determine the reasoning behind why they did a specific thing, but all in all, im very happy with the engine.