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Paper2D Dead?

Unreal Engine Feedback for Unreal Engine team
#1

Hello,

At least more than one UE4 developer is concerned about the lack of updates regarding Paper2D lately.

The trello board has been all but abandoned since August 4th:

So thats nearly 3 months of no updates. On top of that, everything marked for 4.5 appears to have missed the mark, and there hasn’t been any word since.
There are some much needed work on Paper2d, most notably “Batching” which is practically a requirement for anything claiming to run 2d. I jumped on to the Unreal Engine because it promised ‘First Class 2D Support’, but now it feels like it might just be a foot note.

I know you guys have been especially busy, and quite honestly I’m not complaining about how long any said feature is taking to come out the door, but some communication is in order for people who are actively develop 2d projects right now to feel good about the future of 2d in Unreal. But this just isn’t about your existing customers, its also about the future potential for the indie market, which clearly based on the chosen business model was an important market for Unreal.

Anyways, I’m hoping maybe one of the developers out there can chime in about the situation with Paper2d and reassure us that everything is going smoothly and full sail ahead for Paper2d support, and if there is any reason why it’s been on the back burner or going to continue to stay there, we need to know it. I’ve been very happy with the Unreal Engine so far, but a great deal of more love needs to go into Paper2d before someone hangs up the coat!

Thanks!

#2

I second this. Michael Noland was rockin on paper2d. What up? Buying GameMaker? Realizing UE4 too dog big to be leashed to a 2d product. It’s mysterious. Anyway, nothing but love. You guys will figure it out.

#3

I’m sure Michael will chime in here as well, but it’s definitely not on the “back burner.”

Have you seen the release notes for the last two engine releases?

Here is the release notes for 4.4.
Here is the release notes for 4.5.

Between these two releases there have been a number of upgrades and newly added features. With the release of 4.5 “Paper2D plugin is moved out of Experimental folder, as only a few parts of it are still experimental.”

Tim

#4

With all due respect and with no intention of being rude(just trying to be realistic) but changing some text and moving from experimental to whatever it did does not make any difference to all the hardships we are facing every day.
Where to start and where to end?
Flipbook collisions,Translucent materials,Collision bugs(HUGE PROBLEM),Z ordering,2d physics,Tilemap editor,sceletar software import,capsule collision that does not take account slopes and our player hovers above ground like jesus (lol),Matinee fade to black does not work,Flipbook animations do not play when the game is paused but the blueprint is “tickable”,we cannot change alpha on our sprite during runtime, we can not even lock our layers so not to move things around by accident!These are just some of the problems that i have personally documented.Imagine what the rest of the community will discover down the line.

No, there has been no serious development to this plugin for quite some time and it hurts like a motha, all of us that we are trying to create a game with your engine.I love you guys to the death and i have mad respect to your knowledge and abilities but i just cannot accept that the best talent in the business and a multimillion dollar company has left us hanging.I want to remind you once again that we are indies that sacrifice a lot to chase our dreams.We might not pay you a lot but that does not make us any less important.On the contrary.We bleed everyday to push things forward and make this engine the best there is.But please give us something to work with…

#5

Agree. The same thing is with UMG (maybe not that critical but still there is a lot of issues), cycling references in blueprints, lighting and reflections capsules on mobile (if you are working on AAA on hi-end mobile without GL3.0), K1 support which isn’t turned on by default, destructive meshes don’t work on mobile - I’m making 4 games using UE4 on Mobile and I can write issues all day. I would like to motivate Epic to do one release without any new features just fixes and compatibility on platforms. It would be great.

For now if someone is asking me which engine to chose for Mobile game I would go with Unity. It’s just to hard with UE4 right now because every time you will end up with something that isn’t working correctly and you need to make workarounds and implement thing by yourself (which you can done of course if you have a team of programmers which have Unreal experience)

To be not to pessimistic - I’m loving UE4, blueprints, widgets, animation blueprints, editor, materials, pipeline, streaming, behavior trees - I’m working 5x more effective than in Unity.

#6

+1000

Best suggestion i heard in a while.

#7

‘No new features? Ok, we’ll just remove them, but it doesn’t mean we’ll spend more time on fixes.’

Most of features there cause of Dev’s put an effort towards them (as example, Soft shadows - the product of experiment).
If team/developer working on something it doesn’t mean he could switch to other part if You wish so. i.e. flexibility is great but don’t expect from graphics programmer good AI code. As well, sometimes devs just don’t bother about public, they’re doing their work (hope so).

#8

Thanks Tim for the reply. 4.4 was great for Paper2d there is no denying that. But since then there hasn’t been much talk. As you can see from my link with the road map, most of the things marked 4.5 didn’t make it, and it hasn’t been updated as said before since August 4th, so who knows about everything else going forward. I think the community just wants an update about where Paper2d is, so everyone has an idea going forward what to expect.

Also , one of the other features I was personally looking forward to early on was Lua integration, but after the developer got quiet and stopped chiming in, the last message I saw was that ‘they were rethinking everything and moving resources’. Long story short, the sudden quietness surrounding Paper2D is making everyone antsy about it. The occasional update on the forums or Trello would make everyone feel a lot better! None of us really want to wait until 4.6 to find out whats going on with Paper2d.

#9

Hey all, we’re still cranking away on Paper2d, I can confirm it is absolutely not dead. We brought it up on the stream today, and we’ll continue to keep you all updated on it’s progress as we can

Thanks

#10

I think that one of the good things about unreal engine is that with the source available is hard that something so acclaimed by the community get trashed.
Even if the Epic team may get a slow down on a feature someone else at whatever time may make a pull request with some huge steps forward.
If it is a key feature for your project you may also plan to get yourself in the coding or hire someone to do so(it will surely not cost you 20$ per month ,but per hour ,but you may possibly sell it in the marketplace when native plugins will be enabled.

#11

So beyond what has been shown for Paper 2D, is there any thought to build a tool set that could rival the Ubisoft engine that was used to build Rayman Legends and Child of Light?

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XoLpPw864eA

#12

Thanks! So happy to hear it!