Hello everybody, I want to tell you about our experience with UE4 during the last months.
First of all I want to say that I really like the ”idea” of Unreal Engine 4, including the editor, blueprints; the tools for animating and making materials; and also the balance between visual and performance.
But unfortunately it doesn’t feel like a final product, it feels more like an (still) Early Access of what it could be an amazing engine-editor for indie devs and big companies.
What I’m saying is that it has too many errors, bugs and crashes, and those made it almost impossible to work with. It’s extremely frustrating because, as I says before, it’s an amazing idea and such a powerful tool in concept.
We had a break of other project and we decided to give a try to Unreal. So we have been working full time with it during the last two months. At the beginning it was all the adaptations, but that’s ok because it’s another way to work, so it’s just different to Unity in some aspects.
But the problems started right after we started to work in the project.
We usually experience about 5 crashes in just one hour of work. There’re some of them that we know when they’re going to happened just because of the routine.
There’re a lot of crashes, but also bugs of other nature that make things worse.
Just to let you know about some of bugs we’re still dealing with every day, here’s a list:
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After using the editor a couple of times and then trying to compile a big blueprint, it crashes. Next time I open the editor and try to compile it, it’s ok at the beginning. But then, after using the editor, it crashes again.
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When tryging to reimport a mesh, it sometimes crashes.
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When editing a Widget HUD, then compiling, saving it and going to Play in the editor, it crashes.
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In some cases, when trying to open the editor (after a crash), it just crashes again during the loading of the project.
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When save and compile a blueprint from a Level that has other Levels added to Stream, the objects inside those levels unparent from the scene, making it a mess and needing to parent the objects again. When I say parent I mean putting the objects in the hierarchy of the scene (attach).
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El hot compile was expected to be a good solution for save time during compilation, but it makes even worst because when you save and compile the Visual project with the Unreal Engine open it says that you cannot save the blueprints you have open so you need to close the editor anyway and reopen it again. But you don’t see coming until you click save so sometimes you continue working and then try to save but you cannot because of but. It tells you that it’s linked and you can do nothing to recover it.
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In some random cases you need to recompile some blueprints to continue working properly. is too bad because you don’t know when you need that, things start to work weird in Play mode and then you realize that it maybe be related to that blueprint you need to recompile.
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When you try to access an object that was destroyed using the lens icon in the objects properties during the game, it crashes.
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There also other cases where the editor crashes when trying to acces a NULL object, but I don’t think crashing the editor is a good way to get notified about that. Because it doesn’t even tell you that it was because of that, it just crashes again and again.
Just to be clear, I want engine-editor to be working as expected to be, but it’s not right now and that’s making us re-consider the engine we’re going to use for project and other projects in the future. And I know we’re not the only team that is dealing with that.
Hope you guys at Epic receive message as feedback, because that’s what it is. I’m not a hatter or such a thing, just a dev director with a team looking to make the games we love by using the best tools available.
Please, just try to fix kind of things before getting into anything new.
Thank you,
Tobias Rusjan
