I see Tim constantly mention Ease of Access and Ease of Development when referring to UEFN, yet the reality is that it is heading the other way in practice. Just the last 3 updates made the engine much harder to work with, less stable, and requiring more clicks to do the same things.
Let me give some examples:
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Materials now have new obscure settings that define the usage of the material. If you haven’t specified it correctly, the material simply doesn’t render, no errors. Not only you have to get extra clicks to define it, but you also get confused why things stop working.
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.exe of UEFN and FN has stopped working. It was previously a fast workflow tool to skip EGL and how slow it is, and get right into development. Now that has been deactivated.
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UEFN and FN used to run separately. This allowed us to go to check the item shop or replay mode and get nice pictures, while we worked on UEFN developing maps. Now we cant do that anyway, and launching through live edit flow means we sometimes have to wait 40 minutes before we can even navigate FN. Also if any crashes happen, both software have to be restarted as they count as one, which adds more friction and more issues that can bottleneck one another.
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The whole aspect of the verification tool is to protect Epic and annoy developers. However, it was not designed to act upon the action itself, but when testing. Which means that actions taken thinking that the invalidated action is correct are wasted effort. This tool should be removed in the future and be only a temporary workaround for now. In the future, the action that invalidates the game should be fixed when performed, or the asset doesn’t get modified by the user action. That will save both time and avoid confusion trying to find the root cause of the invalidation.
On the contrary, I have noticed a lot of small initiatives that have added QOL back into the development process. Some honorable mentions:
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Batch rename tool. I went to UE5 to manage a FAB pack that I have and it was so frustrating not having the batch rename tool there. This is a must for all software, please congratulate the developer who implemented this, they did a formidable job and everyone is blown away at the QOL it has provided us.
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Modelling tools “fill hole” tool. One edge click, press it, the entire hole in a mesh is now filled. Great tool.
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Dragging a texture in the viewport while making a new model in modelling mode:
This allows me to make a new model in seconds. Create a new shape >> drag texture to it >> drag generated material to the material slot in the tool settings (would love this to be automatic btw and flip texture 180 cause it always makes it be upside down) >> done! This workflow is very new and is what UEFN should be about. -
Mesh Element Selection: Albeit pretty basic and its development has being paused, it contains the valuable “select more” tools, which modelling mode doesn’t have and its one of the most crucial things for editing meshes. Its also instant mesh editing in viewport, which is extraordinary.
However, 2 and 3 were added in the Alpha phase of UEFN, and one was direct feedback from creators (I know cause I made it lol). This has stopped happening for a long time since the UEFN release, and a feedback program should be looking at creators, and asking questions on workflows, with live sessions and creators being filmed doing things, then this is digested and initiatives for UX are born.
There is so much, and I mean so much that can be improved in UEFN in terms of Ease of Development. I ll leave my two current massive lists below for reference, but before all that I want to mention that Epic has to identify that its currently really hard to make games in UEFN and have fun at the moment. Its really hard to do anything without random issues or quirks you need to know that prevent you by default. If UEFN is to become a gateway for new developers to develop content easily without 30 min seminars at every corner, then the editor has to be become intuitive, A LOT more intuitive. And for that to be a thing, there needs to be investment. Epic needs to have an entire team handling ease of access and development, not just a few handpicked developers running an initiative on the scripted tools functionality of UE5 (even though I absolutely love those developers right now, they are the seed to what I am talking about). There needs to be proper investment and investigations on how the tools run in different, external circumstances, with throttling servers and low-end PCs, and then, and only then, UX initiatives can be born.
The reason I am writing this post is because I don’t see enough. We need more, and this is the thing that will make Unreal be the leader in development, not just new technologies for optimization and graphics. This is needed, the editor is stuck in the 90s still in a lot of ways.
Just look at FL Studio that took the step and now their DAW is absolutely incredible in terms of UX and UI. It wasn’t overnight and a lot of bugs were introduced that frustrated their customers, but they understood the final goal and having their motto be “the fastest way from your brain to the speakers” made them the leader in audio composition and engineering. Same with google, the sole thing that made them popular over other engines was the simplicity and quickness of delivering the service.
UE6 should be about that, it should deliver a polished game in the fastest way possible, without loss of quality but through intuitive design.
To close, here are two lists that I have gathered in the past 1.5 years regarding this topic:
Mega list: overall ease of development
All lists: Search results for '#fortnite #general:feedback-requests @Wertandrew list' - Epic Developer Community Forums
UX Main list: Making UEFN a supertool (Part 2 of feedback)
- Overhaul UEFN grid snap to be like Creative or useful
- Landscape edit support for live edit
- Remove intrusive popups like urc check in 24 hr, and run validation checks, convert to options. Also remove all EGL popups when launching uefn, we cant see details tab and they all feel like spam
- Ctrl + Shift + V to be paste here
- Ability to store props in folders in content browser, to make custom galleries and also share them with other creators
- Memory to also reflect server performance
- Buttons to toggle structural grid and visualization (to avoid collapse of structures upon opening live edit). Option to choose to validate structural integrity to avoid collapse.
- Memory optimization tools like Creative (cant optimize atm)
- Drag image on texture node in material editor
- Autosave not to interrupt user actions but to wait for inactivity to work
- Thumbnails to show on scripted custom props without uefn restart
- Migration not to require uefn restart
- HLOD default settings to be optimized to not have a really long load time with memory calc
- Make .exe work again and check for updates in login step, so we can skip EGL (much faster)
- Make FN and UEFN work separately again, we want to work on both for different reasons but we cant after CH5 iirc
- Live edit to be recorded as replay
- Make transform gizmo movement faster (see second link)
- Support for combined transform gizmo and live edit and replace select tool (Q) with it
- Expose texture data gallery from FN for quickly swapping textures on walls and floors
- Ability to see both sides of FN walls in content browser (flip option on wall thumbnails)
- Ability to hueshift all 47k assets with a filter on their speculars to not affect metal parts so we can recolor in scene
- Fix day sequence device so we have a stable workflow for zone lighting
- Improve UX for DEB and verse connections (visualize target in viewport to help prevent human error)
- Pushing changes doesn’t respect the post-game spawn location, it instead spawns you in spawn pads. This makes it so I have to fly all the way to the test location everytime.
- Reduce load times for live edit. Ditch all online services and let us play as a generic skin, so it can load offline. Also some files will always upload even if you change nothing, obvious on large projects, throttle connection and test to see how bad it is
- Reduce editor live edit desyncs (yellow icon), with following priority: devices, multiselection, add new menu actors, main UE lightning, HISM/ISM, everything else
- End game and in-between round load times and issues
- Freeform Transform
- Re-hire Ryan RMS guy to help with Modelling tools and make them even easier and better. His work post-Epic has been great on modelling tools UX/functionality.
- Renaming on content browser not to move asset out of view so you cant see what you are typing
- “New folder” button in outliner to switch to rename straight away and keep folder in view
- No error msg when you write something wrong as an asset name in content browser, but instead convert to the correct format upon end of typing
- Can drag an asset to the filepath on top of the content browser to move/copy it there
- When you hover on the top or bottom side of the outliner while dragging an actor, to scroll up and down the outliner. Scroll wheel also does this, and both make scrolling faster.
- Uefn to close faster
- Migration not to require uefn restart
- Brush for actor multi-selection in viewport
Analytics
- Player activity heatmap on top of the generated map
- Basic demographics so we know what to prioritize translating
List 2: Initiatives focused on direct tool scripting for the agility of development (more items can be found above)
- Editor zone area lighting setup wizard
- Editor visibility of structural integrity (for Fortnite assets)
- Editor visibility of HLOD chunks (for debugging mem calc correlation)
- Editor visibility of guard ai navmesh (only visible through client FN app atm)
- Editor visibility of memory highest cluster (only visible through client FN app atm)
- Editor visibility of instance cost and initial cost of actor pre-placement (only visible through client FN app atm)
- Ability to assign tags to all assets and especially prop definitions, so you can make custom collections of things ( like “wall” tag to be able to be assigned to every FN wall in the game). Collection data to be able to be shared.
- Drag and drop asset from UEFN content browser to live edit (helps remove viewport window out of the workflow and saves space)
- See animations of character devices and animation sequences in uefn
- Directly edit animation sequences in viewport and save as copy or replace anim
- Button that only shows when testing from uefn/creative (only show in phase: Creative)