Loading has gotten out of hand in UEFN, can we just develop without the 43284723 loading screens

[Wertandrew]

I 've been patient. I bought a state of the art PC. Now I have two workstations so I can work faster. AND I STILL PLAY WUKONG FOR AN HOUR before I can even do anything in BOTH computers.

Like what is this guys, I don’t understand how people make games when I have to wait this long just to load the project and Live edit to get started. I 've already reported many times that HLODs cause 300mb+ uploads on a single edit, or URC lags everything and requires multiple times to be initiated to sync or commit. All these were reported last year, and now there are even more popups that cause more loading, that require more waiting. I am my wit’s end with this tool, the fact that I want to be creative and I have to channel my creativity 2 mins at a time, then wait 20 mins is not the way, and I think every game developer and creator will agree.

UEFN needs to be made offline and half of those loading screens need to be gone. The tool has been opened by the unwanted parties anyway, might as well get past that barrier and let us actually develop without the online services.

We should be able to open the tool many times, or host many players to test MP, and instead we just get more loading screens every update. You place a fence in your map? Now you get a popup about nanite and a FN material everytime you launch the project (used to cancel live edit too, not sure if it does it again). Do you want to make some code? You have to find an obscure menu that then has an obscure menu to add a script, which then needs a lot of obscure syntax and commands and oh, needs to be dragged into the level as well, then you need to wait and guess what, all the edits done inside the console are also not supported in live edit, so wait 20 mins for HLODs to do whatever they do, on every edit.

Why, just why? Is this really what was the idea of UEFN? Just a waiting simulator? I want to build, not stare at loading screens. I challenge you to add a counter for every time the editor is inactive due to loading and gather metrics on how we have to wait to develop. I am not even counting crashes and having to load everything again.

Loading continues after live edit has loaded:

PS I absolutely hate this prompt, because although you think you are waiting for live edit to load and you are alt-tabbed doing something else, this screen will elongate the wait until you realize “wait, why is it taking so long?”. Would be nice to track player controls and if they have been inactive for a while, just skip this screen

[v0rdiant]

And saving literally taking ages, especially auto saving spamming every 5-10 mins, the whole thing is just insanely annoying to work with.

We need play in editor, no way Fortnite devs themselves would love waiting around between 3-10 mins for changes to push with the slightest thing they change.

If you work for an hour, literally half of that is lost between saving, uploading, pushing changes, waiting for things to start… PLEASE make our lives easier. Give us PIE, with just jonesy as the mannequin.

[Wertandrew]

And let’s put into perspective that 3-10 mins is for small projects. For our large project, I have to wait 20 mins per edit and 40 mins if I had another project loaded in before the one I am working on, and sometimes it fails to launch live edit too, although its faster on the next time you try to launch.

[Wertandrew]

Edited and added more loading screens for my collection

[v0rdiant]

Oh the other classic that I LOVE, when you push changes and go do something else because you know its gonna take a while, only to come back to the pop up that tells you to save the project before pushing changes… LIKE WHY is it not an automatic thing, obviously if I’m pushing changes I want them to be saved, why am I being asked?

[KeyserScholze]

i’ve done this so many times

please give us the option to tell it to always automatically save when pushing changes

[Wertandrew]

I just realized that the loading times have gotten worse than what I wrote above. I was still comparing to the load times before August, but now for some reason its a 900mb on an edit on our map (this is insanity), different workstations need to reupload the full project on the cloud even if it has been reuploaded fully by another client (this is a feature request btw, would be nice if you upload it then all team members don’t have to again), and HLOD building time has been increased massively, now taking 2 hrs to build HLODs instead of 17 mins. I don’t know what caused this yet, but its extremely annoying to lose so much time just to do so little. I could build a game in other engines in the time it takes to load live edit in this one.

[Shawk]

testing and iteration is a pretty miserable experience compared to UE, I can understand why we don’t really have editor play but it would be nice to have some sort of testing grounds that isn’t 80gb.

[Nman_Pkr]

I’m seeing in some projects a slow down in the VScode when working with Verse. You can actually build your script before VScode finishes its syntax check.

[DustinREDGames]

If they want to attract more game devs to UEFN, the iteration loop needs to get faster. In Unity, I press play and have my game running in seconds. In UEFN, I launch a session and wait 20 min.

Why does UEFN need to upload to the server? Why not just make it launch the FN client and run the server locally for testing/dev?

Why does the server need to build for all platforms? Why not just have the option to only build for my current platform?

There are so many parts of this dev workflow that could be sped up.

[Shawk]

Although a lite/thin client would still be really helpful, or better yet a play in editor like everyone suggests… I am finding I am having to Push Changes far less frequently, I just made a map and I didn’t need to push more than twice, and when I did push it was much quicker than usual (reason I had to push was UI related)

Not sure if I just had a good day cause it relies a lot on server connection it seems… but device property edits or adding devices wise I am rarely having to push changes anymore where as when I noted this in my original reply I was having to push changes after every new device I added and only some edits would make changes without having to be pushed

This has made it much easier to iterate as I can trust my changes now.