I love the engine but why is it so bare bones?

[Poet_11 (William K)]

@Magneto;680816

I was thinking of it mainly from a new user or casual creator point of view. We have a starter pack and various examples but these are basic and unorganized. Something more substantial like a realistic theme content pack which could be used to create a full landscape with lots of materials, foliage, building pieces, roads etc. Plus more fully featured templates with enough in there to get basic ai and interaction going could go a long way. UE4 is like half way there already.

I understand what you wish to have, unfortunately like i said what you may be asking for is a playground to put given assets inside an editor and see what sticks.

• These assets and their creation take time to make if its going to be free from Epic’s part, time that could be spent elsewhere and they already have given some of these from their kite demos, and more assets may not be available for free from them such as those in Paragon because that’s their property for exclusive in house use, maybe when they do something better in the far future they will make the old assets available.

• More realistic assets exist in form of scans, these cost money just like anything else worthy of an investment and even these get modified for any serious game dev.

• If you wish to be serious in seeing UE develop further than IMHO it would be unwise to ask the staff for such content as it would serve no other purpose but to please modders or just hobbyist (if Epic was big enough to handle all then maybe, but they are not at the moment) and would directly backfire on devs who are actually investing their time and money trusting the engine for the bread and butter they may receive at the end of the day, as time should be spent elsewhere that matters to the features they request from Epic. The engine has so many problems than need attention as priority.

This is why I am against trying to cater the engine for all. Again i’m speaking this as a relative beginner in the engine. I don’t want them to spoon feed me with examples. Just give me docs and tutorials. Leave the creation to us artists and if you are developer find a partner who will contribute to art if you are half serious, otherwise its just play, nothing wrong with it but the reality is that the majority who just want to tinker with the engine and ask for features they believe will make their play more fun will definitely hurt the devs working on a title.

[Poet_11 (William K)]

@jwatte;680830

In Unreal, you know that the character is just under 200 units, so a “realistic-ish” indoors will use 300 unit tall walls, and a “game-ish” indoors wil…).

Hi jwatte,

I guess it’s a workflow thing,

We are an indie small team, I speak from that end. Maybe we are used to working differently.

1 UE unit is 1 cm I believe so matching up walls is straight forward for us outside engine, they will come in as expected. We almost never buy assets and make our own, which is why we tend to focus and plan mostly outside engine before bringing the assembly in, even during prototyping.

I think Blender is a great 3d tool for indies who are on a budget. No reason why they can’t use it.

Maybe no harm to have extra BSP tools in engine depending on the amount of demand for it, this all depends on Epic.

Good luck.

[Magneto]

@;680833

I understand what you wish to have, unfortunately like i said what you may be asking for is a playground to put given assets inside an editor and see what sticks.

I get what your saying and agree epic should be mostly focusing on engine improvements and bugfixes but they have been trying to open the engine up to wider uses than purely game dev for sometime now. Perhaps they could put some of the money that goes toward dev grants and use it for a few community content packs. All im talking here is enough assets similar to the kite demo that are properly organised and cover most real world use cases. Like a landscape and foliage pack, city pack, road and vehicle pack etc?

[jwatte]

serve no other purpose but to please modders or just hobbyist

The release of UE4 in the way they did a few years ago, is clearly a way to try to eat their way down from AAA into indie development, as a pre-emptive strike against Unity trying to eat its way up from indie into AAA development.
If hobbyists, modders, and indies are important to Epic from a strategic point of view, then in-engine editing tools are important to them for the same reason.

[Poet_11 (William K)]

@jwatte;680878

The release of UE4 in the way they did a few years ago, is clearly a way to try to eat their way down from AAA into indie development, as a pre-emptive strike against Unity trying to eat its way up from indie into AAA development.
If hobbyists, modders, and indies are important to Epic from a strategic point of view, then in-engine editing tools are important to them for the same reason.

That’s all fine and I wish in a perfect world can be happy. It’s important to note that there is a clear difference between hobbyist/modders vs devs investing/risking their time and money and life into making a product. Needless to say big responsibilities, investors, studio to keep floating. I’m saying if Epic had to choose the choice is obvious to me.

[Poet_11 (William K)]

@Magneto;680851

I get what your saying and agree epic should be mostly focusing on engine improvements and bugfixes but they have been trying to open the engine up to wider uses than purely game dev for sometime now. Perhaps they could put some of the money that goes toward dev grants and use it for a few community content packs. All im talking here is enough assets similar to the kite demo that are properly organised and cover most real world use cases. Like a landscape and foliage pack, city pack, road and vehicle pack etc?

Sure if they provide dev for someone else to put something together then why not.

[MothDoctor]

@TorQueMoD;650838

The ability to adjust screen resolution and other graphics options such as AA, AO, Bloom, Vsync, etc. You know, the core settings you get with pretty much every game ever made. If you’re making a console game, then you should be able to check of a bool that only shows the relevant settings for your target platform. The ability to turn rendering functionality on and off such as shadows. The ability to adjust culling distances for any of the systems that are used by almost - Foliage, cascaded shadows etc. The ability to adjust the volume for different sounds (possibly through a simple tagging system). We have the ability to adjust all of this from within the Editor, but there’s no easy way to expose these options to the player in order to allow them to adjust the settings to suit their needs

Most of this stuff is available. It’s really easy to script video settings or audio settings.
Although I agree it takes time to learn new UI system. Especially that in vanilla UMG you need to script every input (mouse, keyboard/gamepad) for every interactive element independently. And this issue isn’t UE4 specific. Current UI system in Unity has similar issues
Making video settings is quick job, but learning to quickly set up UI isn’t that quick. That’s why providing just menu systems isn’t that important - most of the games still needs in-game UI. And those interfaces are usually dynamic so they require another approach to scripting. Solutions provided by “quick menu systems” can’t be easily adjusted for that

I’m fairly advanced on my “composite UI workflow” which lets you forget about “reinventing wheel” in UI. Well, in most cases, not all of them. Supporting reusable styles, automatic input/navigation handling (works with styles i.e. hovered button changes visual style to Hovered style defined by you), panel management and few more features.
I’m planning to release on marketplace… when it will be really easy to use.