So yesterday I did a building stream like how I used to do in Creative, where I build an artistic scene, or a project live. This time I tried an artistic scene, because I previously complained that artistic builds are very few in UEFN, so I wanted to see why.
In just 15’ of streaming with now a great connection (never had this great of a connection before, another reason I chose to stream now after almost a year), the build process was riddled with bugs that directly affected even the most basic steps towards building Barad Dur that I chose to build (I rebuilt this 10 years ago so I wanted to try again - it’s a hard build but it allowed me to stress-test the tools and engine).
The main issue I encountered was that I couldn’t scale a group of actors uniformly. Sometimes it would work, other times it would scale the actors inside a group only on specific axes. Since I was using Fortnite props for the most part, I couldn’t just make a blueprint actor of say a custom tower, for use in the build, because you can’t do that with Fortnite props. Also, I wanted to apply a Fortnite material from a FN actor to a custom mesh I made (to have consistent geometry of the pointy bits of Barad Dur), and even though copypasting the material worked in UEFN, it didn’t work in FN (rendered as no material grid). Then I tried making a blueprint actor as a parent and attach all the actors to it, so I can scale uniformly (this still works). Still, I stumbled on two old issues that I have already reported as UX, where if one actor is already a child of the attach target, the entire group cannot be attached. There are more cases when grouped actors are concerned that prevent the attachment, but I didn’t notice fully on the stream. Anyhow, so I spent a good 5+ minutes trying to scale groups of actors, and it frustrated me so much I wanted to end the stream right there. Fortunately patience ensued and after 3 attempts on the large orange spiky tower, I managed to scale it down.
Then its the two critical issues with live edit that Epic didn’t hotfix but left a month to be in, where the actor placed in live edit would be rotated differently in UEFN and will also have no texture in UEFN and in general (if placed from Live edit). Since the build stream relies on both UEFN and live edit to build fast, these two issues made it really hard and demotivating to build.
Also I was right that the new loading screen “Validating assets” takes unnecessarily longer to complete, with even a top-tier PC and 1gbps connection, the loading screen still shows and it checks FN actors as well, which shouldn’t happen as those actors should be approved by design. This added a lot of waiting in addition to waiting for live edit to load, something that made the stream boring as no one wants to watch me wait for live edit to load, even if the loading is not long now. Live edit loading was supposed to be faster as time goes on, not slower.
Also while streaming I stumbled on a lot of new issues, like selecting all children on a attach parent will only select one actor instead, and in order to fix that behavior I had to restart UEFN.
Lastly, the second most frustrating issue was that live edit was never synced to UEFN. I was working with existing FN props and every time I would Win+Tab to Live edit, the scene would look completely different than UEFN (seen towards hr 5+ in the vid below). Live edit never used to do this, and its so messy and broken right now. How is this not hotfixed blows my mind. I 've seen 3 creators complain about it online and two also left the scene just the last month, and I took a long break for an entire month till the desync issues are addressed because its a nightmare to build in Live edit at the moment (in the stream I had to build in UEFN and use live edit as a content browser - mainly seen on hour 6+ on the stream). If this happened on Creative, it would have been fixed in 2 days in 2019 or 2021; UEFN seems equally important so what changed?
My stream can be found below, and I am attaching the logs from both UEFN and FN so you can investigate the timestamps as they happened in the stream. The first 4 hours of the stream were the troublesome ones, you ll see me complaining a lot on the first part of the stream (I also mention more issues in it as they happen, so if someone is taking notes they can record the issue).
Stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dL8zPjtSSYI&t=2s&ab_channel=Wertandrew
UEFN Logs:
UnrealEditorFortnite.log (4.4 MB)
FN Logs:
FortniteGame.log (17.8 MB)
Then, moving past the issues and bugs, there is still the case of UX and QOL for level design. NOTHING that I have suggested from last year and that would improve the experience when building and level designing thousands of assets has been added to the tools, they are still wonky and weird. The only addition that I saw was the extensive list of hotkeys that are now exposed to us, which is something that I would process over time to find cool new agile workflows. Here are some examples of the issues:
- Combined transform gizmo is not supported in live edit at all
- Copy-pasting an actor from a prefab gallery that is placed on the scene will paste it as a child of the prefab, then when you want to delete the prefab group, it will delete all the copies you made too. Making a current folder does NOT fix this, there is no workaround at the moment if you work this way. The reason we place prefabs on the scene if because we can browse them more easily and grab props faster in live edit too. It’s good that this doesn’t apply if the prop is selected in Live edit, so this is nice.
- You can’t place flipped assets on the same spot because the pivot points overlap in Live edit, but you can in UEFN which is annoying when trying to build in live edit (this is not a high priority, but a QOL)
- You can’t scale past 5 times the prop size in Live edit, but you can in UEFN.
- Build to prop mode has been broken in Live edit last update, which is one of the most important tools that we have there (currently it applies structural integrity even if set to not do that and it breaks things as you build when making changes and before you ask no I don’t want to push changes all the time to sync with UEFN that this doesn’t apply to because of the new setting, I just want it to work correctly in the first place)
- When Fortnite launches, it takes control of your cursor 2-3 times, so imagine launching live edit and I am alt+Tabbed to Blender while waiting, then the cursor snaps to the center at times. This was added in an update btw and it seems like a hack to fix something.
- You can’t set the position of the character to be respected when you push changes, the character will always spawn in spawn pads or the sky, which makes you lose the spot you were working on.
For more, you can watch the stream, it has a lot of valuable insights on the build process for art and level design and even though I don’t like it, it proves my point that the tools are not good enough for level design and art at the moment. Please take time to address all these issues and ask creators to provide feedback on the process, there is a lot of room for improvement and this affects UE5 as well, there was a lot of times that I thought to myself that CDPR seeing some of these issues will give Epic a bad reputation, so address them before the industry notices (they already started to notice the World Streaming issues I reported last year). Anyhow, if you need anything I am one DM away.