I am reading unreal docs (Unreal Editor Manual) for quite a while already and to my regret the quality of the docs is low. First and foremost problem is not all sections are linked directly from the documentation tree! That is, some sections are hanging separately and I find them occasionally mostly via google or searching on the site itself.
Next, explanations in some reference-like sections (e.g. describing some details panels) are not covering all properties and sometimes explain the property in one sentence or so. Deeper explanations with pictures are often required. Sometimes name of the property is given without the explanation of where the property in the editor is located.
And last, separation of some subsections is strange… Whole pages are dedicated to couple of paragraphs without a lot of useful information. Either put more details or merge subsections.
All in all documentation could be done better and I hope this will be addressed in the future
Thats what Im doing as well. So I get also search results from beyond the UE reference manuals.
Im not considering the UE docs as the kind of lecture one just reads from end to end.
So, if Im looking for something specific, I search and then it doesnt really matter wehther its linked to the tree, nor not.
However, I share one point of criticism: Sometimes the reference just consists of one sentence which merely reiterates the tootip/hint (mostly properties). A bit more in-depth explanation would be nice. Although I must say, for materials, the content examples cover some of that nicely
The usefullness is such a subjective quantity. I dont think it is usefull to generalize .
Also the varying complexity of described editor functionality may warrant a different level of documentation…
All in all, the UE documentation is better than the manual of my last made-in-far-east kitchen appliance with the auto translated manual (turn stick left until sound crack)
Of course docs are not terrible, they just could be better. Usually I’m not that picky, however in this case I got very small amount of time to learn the engine (usually during night hours after work), thus quality of the docs is directly related to the speed of learning.
Hey Devast3d. The docs are constantly being updated and worked on by a discrete team, it just takes a bit of time for them to get around to everything and we have new content every month or two that they have to add in too
The Wiki and these forums are great places to seek help, and answerhub can be useful too. If there’s anything specific you can’t find just ask and usually you’ll get an answer within a few hours!
Documentation is a bit technical compared to unity, I would say, but for me that isn’t a problem. For someone who doesn’t have much dev experience I can see it being a slight problem. But this will only make you a better developer in the long run
Ahe yes i was thinking the same thing, just thinking about CRYENGINE docs makes me shiver.
Epic mentioned it will get a lot of updates over the lifespan of 4.5 so it will only get better.
Yeah, there’s only like dozens of videos on YouTube, a manual, Goo-Gobs of user tutorials and free projects that pretty much cover everything if you do some detective work. I mean really, it’s not like it’s a completely full featured game design environment provided for next to nothing (as opposed to $500,000,000,000 which used to be the norm). What are they thinking? They need to really get it together and start injecting knowledge into our heads like in ‘the Matrix’. Or maybe they should just ask us what we want and do it for us?
Oh. Now I got it, problem seems in one of the plugins. (Tested in Chrome and FF - works fine, but my current version of fox seems not working for some reason, plugin prob.).
Yep, shame on me, I’ve disabled Google AJAX Search API. =P
