I *really* love UE4, but sometimes it's driving me nuts! (minor rant)

General Feedback & Requests
1

We have switched to UE4 some weeks ago, and so far it has been a great journey. The edtior is great, very robust and user-friendly (much nicer than Unity in my opinion). The engine’s performance and rendering capabilities are awesome. And there plenty of features to play around with…

However, there are also some issues that really drive me (us) crazy. For example, there is still no support for custom hardware mouse cursors. First when I saw these forum postings about custom mouse cursor I thought this must be a joke – no custom hardware mouse cursor?! I mean, these are supported in every basic game engine or framework I have worked with so far, since many many years. This is a must-have in a wide array of games, I simply don’t understad why there is no support for custom hardware cursors in UE4.

Or another thing: There is an open bug in UE4.7.6 that prevents us to reimport an FBX static mesh. This bug has been reported over 2 months ago, but it is still not fixed. However, this is not some minor bug. You have to be able to reimport a static mesh after updating it in a 3d modelling software. That is such a basic workflow, how could it be that things like these don’t get highest priority at Epic?

What bugs me is that Epic comes up with super-advanced new features every release, which are great, no question. But they should fix those basic issues first! I have no use of those super-advanced features if the low-level and basic things don’t want to work :frowning:

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, I don’t want to complain too much. I really do love UE4, and I know it’s a great product. But how should we deal with these issues I have described above?

PS: I know that since we have access to the source code I could fix these things on my own. But that is not really an answer, that might be a workaround at best, since we are paying for the engine if we use it in a commercial and successful project…

2

Hi ,

Thanks for talking to us about where we can improve.

I looked into that FBX reimport error and bumped up the “community interest” substantially since we are seeing it affecting many people. I’ve also talked with about getting this a higher priority and rectified.

Custom hardware mouse cursors are on the “To do” list and I’m talking with my lead now to see about the possibility of prioritizing it higher.

[]
how should we deal with these issues I have described above?
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This is a fine way to give us your opinions and concerns. We’re always looking over the feedback section for reports of issues that we were either unaware of or not aware of the severity.

3

Hi , thank you very much for your quick reply.
I appreciate it a lot to see that you are actively watching this forum and respond to the feedback here.

4

[= ;297260]
I looked into that FBX reimport error and bumped up the “community interest” substantially since we are seeing it affecting many people. I’ve also talked with about getting this a higher priority and rectified.
[/]

I have seen that Eric has replied on the UE4 answers forum, they are aware of this bug, it will bie fixed.
Thanks for that, however, the fix will not make it into 4.8 apparently :frowning:

[= ;297260]
Custom hardware mouse cursors are on the “To do” list and I’m talking with my lead now to see about the possibility of prioritizing it higher.
[/]

Is there any feedback from your dev team on this issue?
Any ETA, or at least rough idea when it will be implemented?

Thanks!

5

It pays to have someone in your team well-verse in C++ so he/she can pick and compile the revision which fixes the problem.

6

Well, compiling UE would not be the problem.
But we have to stick to official releases … kind of a policy here :slight_smile:

7

Hey Epic, would you please be so kind and give us at least some feedback on these issues? I understand that you cannot give an exact ETA on when they will be addressed, but a bit more information would not hurt for sure :slight_smile:

8

[= ;297260]
Custom hardware mouse cursors are on the “To do” list and I’m talking with my lead now to see about the possibility of prioritizing it higher.
[/]

Please try to get this out as soon as possible, the software cursors just don’t cut it for a mouse heavy game, they just add an extra “ugh” layer to mouse based interactions (which is bad).

9

Hey Epic guys, I know I repeat myself here, but I wouldn’t do so if you could give us some kind of feedback.
As mentioned I don’t expect a specific ETA on this (in particular the hardware cursors), but at least something?!

I know you cannot listen to any single request here, but please try at least to communicate a bit more :confused:

10

Anything? No?

11

[=;322601]
Anything? No?
[/]

Hi ,

At present, there hasn’t been any movement on UE-11538 (FBX Reimporting Bug), however it is marked as a “Normal” bug, which means it hasn’t been backlogged so while it may take some time it isn’t in a status where it may take even longer to address. I’m asking around about the custom hardware cursors and will get back to you once I have some more information on the subject.

12

That’s great, thanks.
I am looking forward to your feedback!

13

[=;323095]
That’s great, thanks.
I am looking forward to your feedback!
[/]

I’ve spoken with some of the developers here and from what I can gather, this is something we are looking at in the future, but it is a non-trivial amount of work so this is going to take quite a bit of time before it is ready to be implemented. The reason is that, because we are a cross platform engine, it is more difficult to implement an agnostic solution to this problem. Keep a lookout to future releases for more information but it will probably be quite a while before anything significant is added.

14

I really appreciate your feedback, , but what you are saying is quite disappointing ::

I understand that UE4 is cross platform, obviously, and I also know that the Unreal engine is coming from the world of FPS (read: Unreal Tournament) games. You might not need proper mouse cursors in those games. However, I also see that UE4 targets not only FPS games any more, but a wide range of various game genres with different input mechanics.

So in that perspective, how can hardware mouse cursors not be a top-priority at Epic? Software cursors are not a replacement, not at all. If anything then they are some kind of workaround. I understand that you need to make the engine as attractive to as many developers as possible, in order to make it a success and thus profitable. But frankly, what good is an engine that supports the most sophisticated rendering features for super-realistic graphics, with loads and tons of features and capabilities, if some of the most basic features are not supported? As someone else said in another thread here: hardware mouse cursors have been supported in nearly any single game (engine) since the 90’s (and maybe even before), it’s quite a shock to see them missing in UE4. Frankly, IMHO software cursors are a no-go for any PC-based game nowadays. I still can’t believe how anyone using UE4 can ship a game without proper hardware cursors…

At the bottom line from reading this whole thread again it all comes down to this: You guys at Epic are doing a great job with UE4, it’s really a wonderful product and an awesome game engine. However, it seems you are spending all your men power on super-fancy new features to showcase the engine, rather than (also) spending your resources on basic features and bug fixes (like the FBX thingy) that are overdue for a long time.

… which is quite disappointing in my eyes :frowning:

15

idk if this helps… [ TUTORIAL / C++ Advanced ] Custom hardware cursor loading for Win and Mac - Community & Industry Discussion - Epic Developer Community Forums TUTORIAL / C++ Advanced ] Custom hardware cursor loading for Win and Mac.

one of the first things that popped up when I did a search.

16

Yes, thanks, I know that solution. It has one major drawback though: You need to modify sources and compile on your own.
That is not an option in our case for several reasons…

17

[= ;323150]
I’ve spoken with some of the developers here and from what I can gather, this is something we are looking at in the future, but it is a non-trivial amount of work so this is going to take quite a bit of time before it is ready to be implemented. The reason is that, because we are a cross platform engine, it is more difficult to implement an agnostic solution to this problem. Keep a lookout to future releases for more information but it will probably be quite a while before anything significant is added.
[/]

In my opinion it would not be a problem at all to make this only working on windows at first and add support for other platforms later. Let’s being honest, are linux and mac users really important to most game developers? No, they are not. Gamers use windows. At least being able to use hardware cursors on windows only would probably satisfy 95% of the developers who use UE4. Linux and Mac also don’t support all the DirectX features as far as I know, so if they only support software cursors that’s probably ok, you can add it in a few months when you have time to do it, but adding it to windows should really be not take longer than 4.9. It’s just a must have feature. Or have you ever used a UI in a any game (like inventory etc) with a software cursor? It just does not work.

There even is a solution for this like CloDel Studios pointed out, you at Epic could just copy and paste the code into the UE4 source and it would work. Just adding it each time manually to each new UE4 version and each new hotfix is not possible for most of us.

18

Agreed - all of our games are Windows only. Is Unreal Engine becoming a non-PC centric dev platform? Sure hope it remains focused on the PC.

Also, would really like true, out-of-the-box Windows Store support.

19

I am a gamer too and I use Linux. Why don’t you guys suggest: hey epic, drop all support for PS, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS and HTML. Yeah, let’s be honest. Who plays games on those Platforms? Every gamer on this planet is using Windows OS only. How dare those people.
And your suggestions shows that you don’t care and do not posses any advanced knowledge about the topic: cross platform.

Make it first work on this platform and later on the other ones, is the first mistake in cross platform development.
Linux and Mac do not support all DirecX features??? Just had to ROFL reading that one. I am sure its not a big deal for epic to program those parts in one day. The challenge is to design the cross platform version of that.

And please stop using the term PC so wrong. PC is not an OS.

20

[=Yaakuro;325233]
I am a gamer too and I use Linux.
[/]

Welcome to the club.
I am using Linux as platform as well, as long as I don’t work with the UE editor.

[=Yaakuro;325233]
Why don’t you guys suggest: hey epic, drop all support for PS, Mac, Linux, Android, IOS and HTML. Yeah, let’s be honest. Who plays games on those Platforms? Every gamer on this planet is using Windows OS only. How dare those people.
[/]

Frankly I don’t get your point here. What do really suggest? Do you want to start yet another flame war on which OS is better? My original post in this thread does not state at all that I would like to see hardware cursor support for Windows only. What I said and still say is that hardware cursor support is a need-to-have, not a nice-to-have. No modern AAA game in the world that uses (custom) mouse cursors would do that in software mode. And apparently others here see it similar.

I think what people mean (and even as Linux user I can see that point) is that Epic could simply start with supporting hardware cursors on a few platforms, that is PC platforms (Win, Linux, Mac). Since a basic solution has already been proposed, it should not be that hard to include it in the official repo sources and UE releases. That would satifsy all those who are releasing their game just for PC platforms. And I would assume most games with mouse support are played on PCs, not consoles. Then Epic would have more time to create a proper cross platform solution, while the rest of us still could work with the temporary solution.

[=Yaakuro;325233]
And your suggestions shows that you don’t care and do not posses any advanced knowledge about the topic: cross platform.

Make it first work on this platform and later on the other ones, is the first mistake in cross platform development.
Linux and Mac do not support all DirecX features??? Just had to ROFL reading that one. I am sure its not a big deal for epic to program those parts in one day. The challenge is to design the cross platform version of that.
[/]

Nobody here would complain about a proper cross platfrom support for hardware cursors. The argument is another one: If the solution is nearly there, why can’t Epic simply include that one into the official releaes, until they have time to implement a full solution for all UE platforms?

[=Yaakuro;325233]
And please stop using the term PC so wrong. PC is not an OS.
[/]

Fully agreed on that one :slight_smile: