UE assumes everything to be turned on and running for some reason!
All switches are on, objects cast and receive shadows by default, they have full collisions turned on by default, character can step is ON by default, a thousand needless plugins loaded by default and so on and so forth!
I find myself creating BP’s with objects and sometimes forgeting to uncheck collisions or remove shadow casting when it should be the exact opposite, please stop assuming what the user wants as default to be turned ON, it is easier to consiously turn on features than turn them off or forget that they are ON in the first place.
Most annoying feature is the collision, please let it be set to “No collision” by default and set “Can character step on” OFF as well, so we don’t have to do this manually every single time to every single object created in the engine.
I’m sure someone here will tell me to dig into some .INI or source code for this, but the whole point of feedback is to make the engine more efficient to use by default and with less tweaking required on the basics.
there might be some projects where 99% of actors and components need to have collisions and shadows as default; if it was changed, they would have to turn everything on for every single component - same as you turn everything off now. “Less tweaking on the basics” in this case is exactly the current behavior.
the current system is much easier for on-boarding, new developers can just drop down some actors, and they are gonna work - collisions, visibility, etc.
and also changing such low-level defaults would break like 10 trillion projects which depend on them
In conclusion, although this change would be comfortable for you and your projects specifically, it would be a pain for many other developers, so I see it extremely unlikely to be changed (rightfully).
I guess I’m in the minority then, I still stand by the idea though that any engine should come bare minimum of things loaded and simply “add on” or “Turn on” features if and when required.
I will accept other reasoning but not the one aimed at “new comers” who want to feel comfortable as they drag and drop and hit play.
How about create a project profile that comes in bare bones and one that is aimed at just the usual crowd. I still don’t know why we need to have a dozen unwanted plugins loaded among the other things mentioned here.
Maybe other people have a different experience, mine has been constantly turning off features, Ex, I create an enemy BP add a box and if I forget to turn off collisions, overlaps, etc… on that box, next time I run the game my enemy units are inter colliding, getting stuck and I have to dig up to see why. While it is much easier to spot if a character falls through something and immediately tells you it is missing collisions somewhere.
It’s not always the case that it’s easy to find missing collisions, especially for complex systems where collisions don’t have very evident results like characters falling through the floor.
You should probably find a better workflow if you regularly forget to turn off collisions for your components which don’t need it.
For any component I create, the first thing is that I go through all the important properties (collisions, visibility) and set them up. You should get used to doing the same.
I really like the one where you buy an occulus rift…and then just cause the occulus software is installed on your system, now every project you created before you even had the software installed…boots up in VR mode…even when the headset isnt even plugged in…which if it isnt it crashes to desktop.
And now you have to plug the headset in just to be able to launch the editor and switch the plugins off. Or mess with config files.
Default settings are never satisfactory. That’s not the purpose, obviously.
You can create your own templates for your expectations. May not be the best option but probably the closest you can get with least effort.
Engine plugins have their own uplugin file you can disable the EnabledByDefault property, and it won’t load for you next time by default. You can also specify plugins in uproject thus disallow engine booting those guys for that particular project.
It is very powerful indeed, and you can specify custom ini settings for your templates as well.