My thoughts/complaints after two Unreal weeks

[Detocroix]

Background

I am an Unity developer who moved over to Unreal since 4.0 was released to public. I have been a huge fan of Unreal engine since release of first Unreal game and as a kid the Napali castle (?) blew my mind. It inspired me to pursue games and 3D arts, but I was unable to work with Unreal as it wasn’t quite “public” enough for small and insignificant person such as I. Now that Unreal 4 came out and I saw how awesome it was shaping out to be for indie developers, I quite literally threw away my work on Unity and switched over.

I have been working on Unreal for 2 weeks now and I’ve written down some of my thoughts regarding issues I see… yes of course I’ll write about issues because I’m a negative little artist Joking aside, I’m insanely impressed with how Unreal 4 works and how great the graphics pipeline and rendering is. These are written from point of view of an artist who can script but doesn’t know indepth things about code.

Thoughts

Window presets should be saveable and usable globally instead of bound to project (?)

Global object scale would be a brilliant addon. Some scales are really hard to setup in modelling softwares and Unity <> Unreal scales are weird? Global import value in Unreal would make it betterish questionmark

Editor window secondary windows (Blueprint editor, material editor etc) need some easy way to tag either as render on top or respect window order.

Regarding additional windows, I wish I could make one main window widget that would contain all additional windows. I could have corner of my monitor with blueprint editor visible all the time and still have nice play window etc tabs without switching windows. Currently 2 monitor setup is absolutely the best option for Unreal because it’s complicated to switch between windows (as one of them is forced to stay on top)

HTML5 docs are weird and confusing. I understand it is currently on experimental stage, but it definitely must ship with the editor in the future (to enable widespread use!)

One thing I love about Unity is auto-generating normal maps from heightmaps and it would be nice option for Unreal too. Import heightmap as normal map with baked values for roughness and intensity.

Automatic expose of public variables (e.g. material instance stuff) in Details panel instead of having to open everything in secondary window.

XML and JSON parsers shipped directly with Unreal editor. If Unreal is marketed to non-coders (as seen in some “You can make whole game without ever touching c++!” -phrases) it is extremely important that people have access to those from start as they are very important for any smart game development. I know it is possible to implement XML parser through c++ but I am very uncody person.

Object palette. While a personal wish and request, It would be great to have additional tab that would be object palette, you could build sets of objects for easy level building similarly to what Modes tab has for BSP. I believe Collections are somewhat similar to this, but not exactly?

Ability to adjust curves of Blueprints. I am a visual person and it is very easy to create complex and complicated Blueprints that have explosion of links!

Bug: Some folders are undeletable. I have “roots” folder that I used to hold some actor root blueprints and then I moved them away and deleted the folder, but everytime I restart editor the roots folder reappear. I have couple other folders like that

Global normal map intensity slider. I’m not sure if fault is in my normal maps or something else, but normal maps I’ve used in Maya and Unity are nicely intense etc but in Unreal they are extremely weak in depth. I do like the way they look but it’s odd they’re so different looking. If I disable diffuse map I can see the normal map exists there, but if I throw diffuse map on I can barely detect the normal map under it.

I wish Unreal came with some more advanced foliage and water shaders. I have setup mine based on some user shaders, but some easy defaults would be great. I find the standard asset shaders to be a bit too barebones and ancient in quality. Water doesn’t have depth fog, no buoyancy, tessalated waves etc. Foliage examples in content examples I don’t understand, it is complex and I can’t just copy paste it somewhere else to see how it works. I wish they were a bit more everyday usable.

Starting a fresh project: It would be great to have ability to start with all basic blueprints generated (albeit empty!) and in project folders. The hud, hero etc, instead of starting with default functionality. For me it was the hardest thing to understand. I tried to make new blueprint and just write things there but it did nothing because mouse control was instantly caught by the default fps movement.

Build and bake option in playmode would be really nice OR ability to build custom editor camera controls. I want to be able to play in editor, walk to location as it looks like in game and then adjust and build it. Currently I can walk there, end play mode (and camera jumps slightly because settings are different) and then build and click play again. Slight annoyance.

A bit bigger weirdness (unrelated to above point) is that Play mode camera restore points don’t include “Start at camera trace point” (or something similar) nor “Continue from last point”. The spawn at current camera location works fine for FPS games but very weirdly for top-down games and probably horribly for 2D platformers.

Debug print node in Blueprints should allow more indepth printing, e.g. drag actor to it and it should by default print some information related to actor OR drag array to it and it would AT LEAST print that array name and lenght. It feels overly complex to try to debug things using text printing because it doesn’t accept most of the stuff you just quickly want to see (what ends up in a variable etc).

We have F to focus on object, but I would need to have (button) to focus on trace hit point. E.g. when handling big terrains it’s really hard to move between locations. Personally I’ve fixed that by making targetpoint objects and select + focus on them. But trace focus at some presettable distance would be brillient addition to navigating big scenes.

[Tim_Hobson]

Hi Detocroix,

Thanks for all the feedback! Information like this is always greatly appreciated.

I’m working my way through some of the information you’ve posted. I wanted to go ahead and say thank you letting us know and to let you know I’m about to start looking through some of these issues/bugs that you’ve reported and see if I can help get you some answers on if this is a bug/limitation/or otherwise. Some of the things you’ve mentioned are already possible in the editor that you may not have been aware of.

I’ll be responding shortly.

As I get to some issues I may request further details.

Thank you!

Tim

[Tim_Hobson]

Hi again!

There are some things that you’ve requested or had thoughts about that are currently already available in the editor. They may be hidden or something you were not aware of currently, especially with only a couple of weeks use in the editor.

I’ll do my best to answer these and any other questions you may have.

Bug: Some folders are undeletable. I have “roots” folder that I used to hold some actor root blueprints and then I moved them away and deleted the folder, but everytime I restart editor the roots folder reappear. I have couple other folders like that

This may be an issue where things are being redirected. When you’ve had an object, like your blueprint or a material, in a folder and you move it to another the engine leaves behind a small file that will redirect to the new location of that asset.

If you open the engine folder where you had your folder named “Root” or whatever the name is, you may see a small file that is around 1-2kb in size. This seems like there may be some of these files that are being left behind.

The documentation on this is here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Basics/Redirectors/index.html

To use the “fixupredirects” you’ll want to create a editor shortcut. Right-click > Properties > add -fixupredirects behind the Target location.

Give this a try and see if the issue is still occurring please let me know and I’ll continue to look into the issue and see what can be done to resolve it.

HTML5 docs are weird and confusing. I understand it is currently on experimental stage, but it definitely must ship with the editor in the future (to enable widespread use!)

Even though this is in an experimental state at the moment, is there anything in particular that you would like to see from the docs in this area? Also, if you have any specific areas that are confusing I can pass the notes along to the docs team so that they are aware of any areas people are getting stuck or areas that may need more focus to help.

One thing I love about Unity is auto-generating normal maps from heightmaps and it would be nice option for Unreal too. Import heightmap as normal map with baked values for roughness and intensity.

While the UE4 does not have auto-generated option you can still create Normal maps from your heightmaps by using the “NormalsfromHeightmap” function found in the material editor.

More information on this setup can be found here in the documentation: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/Functions/Reference/Procedurals/index.html#normalfromheightmap

Ability to adjust curves of Blueprints. I am a visual person and it is very easy to create complex and complicated Blueprints that have explosion of links!

Have a look at the Reroute nodes. These can help cleanup and keep your wires a little more organized in the graph.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Support/Builds/ReleaseNotes/2014/4_3/index.html

Add Reroute Node… now shows up in the context menu when you click-drag off of a pin; you can make connections to a reroute pin like normal, move it around (by dragging near it or ctrl + dragging on it), and remove it by Alt + Clicking.

You can also put comments on a reroute node by double-clicking on the draggable area below, or hitting F2.

Global normal map intensity slider. I’m not sure if fault is in my normal maps or something else, but normal maps I’ve used in Maya and Unity are nicely intense etc but in Unreal they are extremely weak in depth. I do like the way they look but it’s odd they’re so different looking. If I disable diffuse map I can see the normal map exists there, but if I throw diffuse map on I can barely detect the normal map under it.

This can be done via the material editor by using a setup similar to this:
Plug the texture sample into a multiply node, create a vector parameter. Set the values to RG will be your values to adjust the intensity of the Normal. The Blue channel should always remain at 1. Plug this in to slot B on the multiply and plug the multiply into the normal map slot on the material bar.

Normal at default intensity

Normal at quarter intensity

Normal at 5 times intensity

I wish Unreal came with some more advanced foliage and water shaders. I have setup mine based on some user shaders, but some easy defaults would be great. I find the standard asset shaders to be a bit too barebones and ancient in quality. Water doesn’t have depth fog, no buoyancy, tessalated waves etc. Foliage examples in content examples I don’t understand, it is complex and I can’t just copy paste it somewhere else to see how it works. I wish they were a bit more everyday usable.

At the moment there are some limitations with translucent materials since Unreal Engine 4 uses deferred rendering. There are plans to implement forward shading model to help with this in the future, although currently is on the backlog to other priorities.

You can take a look at our Trello board for the UE4 roadmap to see what is being focused on currently.

For things like Buoyancy, you would want to use a Physics Volume that you set to water volume.

This user, Handkor, demonstrates his setup and even provides a tutorial for his buoyancy setup for dynamic objects.

Dynamic physical ocean

One of our support staff, Andrew Hurley did a simple tutorial for setting up a water volume for your character in our Wiki tutorials section: A new, community-hosted Unreal Engine Wiki - Announcements - Epic Developer Community Forums

For a good example of tessellated waves you may want to check out the “Features Tour 2014” example in the Learn tab of the launcher. There is a good example of waves and ocean there (If you’ve not already seen that), just look for M_WaterSin.

If these aren’t fitting please let us know what areas you’d like more information.

[Jacky]

@Detocroix;187850

We have F to focus on object, but I would need to have (button) to focus on trace hit point. E.g. when handling big terrains it’s really hard to move between locations. Personally I’ve fixed that by making targetpoint objects and select + focus on them. But trace focus at some presettable distance would be brillient addition to navigating big scenes.

As a workaround for now you can set Bookmarks for keyboard keys 1-9 at any location in a level. You can find that option when you click on the arrow in the top left corner of the viewport > Bookmarks > Set Bookmark.

[Detocroix]

Thank you! I only just noticed my first forum post actually went through, I thought it just failed to post. Thank you for the awesome reply! There are quite a few things that have changed in Unreal and things I’ve learned to reorient myself with and Unreal is absolutely a blast to work with. There were some nice tricks in your reply too. Thank you again!

[qdelpeche]

I only found these tips because you posted on this thread … guess you are never too old to learn something. Thanks for this. 8-}