The learning portal is currently somewhat disorganized at the more detailed levels of learning. It’s easy to access courses, but when I have, I don’t know how to get at certain ‘lessons’ or videos about more particular things in the engine. There’s at least 3 materials courses, each of which could contain how-to instructions for transparency and its different methods. As a beginner, I don’t know which is the one, or if one contains the method I’m looking for or not…so I’m going to be clicking around and trying to fast-forward thru videos and presentation slides to target the exact instructions (which I already don’t recognize entirely). The courses need a fresh change in organization and accessibility that’s more helpful in bringing users to the content they’re looking for or require to learn engine features. Since Youtube is not the easiest to target specific lessons / tutorials in either, it would present an opportunity for Unreal Learning Portal to become a more relevant and established source. One idea for that is supplanting the current structure with the linking and tooltip hints with context-specific “Table of Contents” or “Index” pages that connect directly to the different content they reference. Index is a model to use because it’s similar to the index of a textbook where page numbers are listed for a specific topic or a word / phrase. Table of Contents is useful for not overwhelming the user with a ton of words, instead making it easier to discover and relate to in a categorical organization with ‘page’ references. If interested in the idea I’m presenting, I would create a detailed example and share it in or outside of the forums.
While a progression system with visual representation sounds like a nifty idea and could provide a guide of sorts to newer users, I think it would be mostly an annoyance or a hindrance to experts and experienced users. It would also be insubstantial to people who want / need to learn Unreal Engine quickly and thoroughly, such as those people who work for architecture companies or independent contractors who produce visualizations for cars, landscapes, and such. GIS and other mapping technologies would also probably be rather disinterested in utilizing a learner progression system unless it somehow helped to speed up their access to information / instruction and made their work reasonably more efficient and their time/effort more sustainable.
I agree with the view of documentation needing improved function and completeness. Sometimes I wonder if people who didn’t really know the engine well enough wrote it. Like a mechanic who specializes in car transmissions wrote a textbook about airplane engine cooling, not truly understanding or having worked with airplanes. Other times I obtain exactly what I need in the docs. Yet, it is often enough for an outdated version of the engine in a way that the information on new features is missing and how pre-existing features work now is not complete or is inaccurate. For instance, I still cannot find a doc page on the mesh editor’s details panel with an explanation and instruction on how to use the various settings. I found it before, but haven’t discovered it again. I had bookmarked lots of doc pages, then got a new computer so those disappeared from my reach. It doesn’t bode well for beginners, intermediates, or experts in regard to the docs overall. CVars aren’t easy to understand all the time, and I see no direct link to those in the docs or in the engine. Is it assumed that I should learn from doing an archeological dig in the forums to understand how I can fix certain issues with shadows or ray tracing by testing the cvars and their unexposed parameters? My point is the learning content needs to be accessible and thorough rather than hidden behind a veil of in-depth linking among pages, treasure hunting in the myriad videos and slides of broadly categorized courses, and reverting to youtube search algorithms…even to learn pretty basic things.