I really like this resource. It’s a shame I am constantly being logged out and served with errors (csrf and just general unavailability). Often times I have to copy and paste my posts to a text file for fear of them being erased when I hit submit because of logout and csrf issues. Is this an area of active development?
Yeah. Honestly, I’m doing okay with the engine itself, and I love it. I feel like I made the right choice, but I’m confused as to why they wouldn’t want to invest in this area. I guess UDN is like a paid support service?
UE4 AnswerHub honestly is a very generous offer from Epic - just imagine dedicating a few competent and experienced Epic engineers to answer indies which has low (no offense) ROI. At that time, I feared that it will not last long and it has been proven over the time. If you wanna switch engine just because of this, you are welcome to do that - the other side grass is always look greener.
Having an unmaintained system written 10 years ago, which looks like it was made in 20 years ago, full of bugs and inconveniences, is not a “generous offer”.
Yep, I think we all except Stack Overflow quality from such community-driven “tool”. Cause like 95% of questions can be easily answered/solved by community members using this engine for years. No need for direct support from Epic engineers and this would be impossible. Engineers should spend most of their time engineering 
It’s so much untrue. I see their activity when new big systems come: audio system, new sky, virtual texture.
And that’s reply in truly not-critical thing, just 4 days go.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unre…t-spline-point
Yes, it’s not like they would come and discuss everything. I don’t see the point in this. Community is huge, almost 100k people on Unreal Engine subreddit alone…
However, I notice that the lion share of questions comes from people who don’t have a skilled engineer in their team. Or they solo devs, enthusiasts. (correct me, if this observation is incorrect). Their questions/doubts could be easily addressed by the in-house programmer or technical designer/artist with experience with the engine. These are not the problems that would need engine guy most of the time. Especially that in-house programmer could be simply tweaked engine’s code in many cases instead of waiting for the official response…
I would risk a statement that we don’t lack the involvement of Epic engineers here. What we need is more improvement on forums/AH and “anything online”, so it would be easier to connect “people with problems” with “experienced problem solvers”. Stack Overflow design makes it so effective to find questions already answered and topics already discussed. No similar mechanism exists on Answers Hub or this forum. Basic questions are asked hundreds of times… I was spending much time earlier this year on Unreal Slackers helping out people, but I stopped it became tedious to reply all the same questions all the time… Terrible waste of time for people who want to help out… (community people or Epic people)
It is generous in term of the offer. If you have just come into using game engine merely a few years ago, maybe you will not think it is generous. Back then (10 years ago), a lot of game devs have to create their own game engine which is very expensive in term of times and other resources. And then Unity comes, but it is not free as we all know it. And then UE4 come, challenging Unity offerings as well all know it. Unreal Engine, which licensing fees reaching 6 figures in the past, suddenly is being offered for almost free back then ($19/month).
And with all these, you are focusing on the 10 years support system… lol. And not to mention all of those UE4 staffs offering their answers foc to the indie programmers (which you clearly omitted in your response).
Sorry BUT the past is the past, now is now. Apple didn’t have the App Store either in the past and didn’t care about small indie developers. Then things changed. So what? Not giving updated documentation to everyone and having the engine with bugs that take ages to get fixed or never get fixed is just not good. While it’s true that Apple doesn’t make the source code for its operating systems public still they have the APIs documents always up to date with plenty of examples and most bugs get fixed continously to ease the work of both large software houses and small indie developers using XCode and publishing on the App Store. There is no reason why Epic Games shouldn’t do the same.
Does UDN really have different UE4 documentation than what we have access to? Genuinely curious as I have seen this claim thrown around a lot but I have never had access.
UDN has no more documentation than anybody else.
The bottom line is that those who have lots of experience are usually going to be too busy elsewhere to answer tech support questions for the general public at large. There are still plenty of us who do our best to answer questions when we have the time - but for those of us who have been here a long time, answering the same question asked a different way over and over again gets old quickly.
I personally find answerhub frustrating (I do the same copy-pase because I don’t trust it), but unless the existing information that’s there can be ported to another more suitable medium (stack overflow-style would be much nicer) then we’re probably stuck with it, for better or worse. What we don’t want is a repeat of “The Great Spontaneous Wiki Deletion.”
Most of the very basic questions all have answers now. The best trick to getting a response, is to present the question in a way that makes it easy to answer - that and google before you ask.
You have to appreciate the complexity, and I done see that in here. If you look at Unity, I believe their “bug” state are worse off, and you begin to wonder why. However, it does not mean we tolerate code bug, it is just that it is complex. For an example, a lot of crash is due to driver (buggy driver etc) which has no relation at all with game engine. But I believe both game engines and driver manufacturers work together, to certain extend to solve these bugs.
That is also one of the major reasons why publishers like publishing to console - because they have fixed hardware vs computers which has os ranging from windows 7 -> 10, nvidia, atis etc etc etc. It is also far easier to optimize because we know beforehand the hardware.