UE4 is a great tool for making games, but to make a game you need to plan it out first, and yeah you could make folders and make hierarchies in those folders for meshes videos etc, maybe use paint to draw your levels but it would be so much easier to do if UE4 had this Project management feature built into it, Here are some features which I think would be great:
2D Level Planning page so you can draw out your levels before you create them
Documentation feature so you can easily create design docs, scripts, dialogs etc.
Resource management folders so you can put all your meshes, sounds, textures etc.
Flow Chart for mapping out mechanics or anything else that goes into the game
Storyboarding page to plan out your stories
A page where you can upload 2D representations for entities so you can place them in the 2D level planner so you can see where entities should go in the maps.
A Path maker tool in the 2D world program so you can show where paths should be in the level.
I think this would make a great addition to the Engine, what do you think.
I think what you want this all the software “articy: draft2”.
I know some of these features would be interesting if there were within the Unreal Engine, but I think this is beyond the scope of engine.
We’ve been making use of a make-shift combination of Confluence, Save The Cat & internal software/applications to make do with our ever increasing game design & writer needs…
I’ll be getting a trial of this software before the week is out and I will look at potentially getting development of a UE4 articy:draft/draft API Plugin underway to support UE4’s Curve/Table Chart Excel/CVS importing feature, unless there is already a plugin available for this???
To save others time who might be seeing this post, I’ll attach some videos at your convenience
Thanks for the suggestion HeadClot, but we use Server behind our dedicated servers firewall & while Trello is good it does not suit our needs due to its lack of complexity.
With that being said, Trello is very handy when tracking small projects or personal tasks & I sometimes use it for just that
P.S. before you ask we use Stash for our source control & HipChat Server for our communications, however Perforce Helix seems appealing & if it weren’t for Slack being Cloud-only we would’ve gone with it over HipChat Server.
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Best we keep on the topic of this thread moving forward though
But perhaps in future I might consider writing a wiki post on the subject of the ideal overall production tools for international teams
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Moving back to the topic of this thread:
I would LOVE to see a feature like this make its way into Unreal Engine 4 for use in animation & camera sequencers/storyboards as a reference/side-by-side starting point, perhaps as part of the upcoming Sequencer & Animation tool updates
A combination of these 2 suggestions could be made with UE4’s AI Blackboards/Behaviour Trees for dialogue trees (plugin opportunity?)
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With that being said,
Depending on demand I might add these features to our UE4 Plugin development roadmap for Marketplace release or GitHub Pull Request at some point in the unforeseeable future but I encourage either Epic Games or a 3rd-party developer to use these suggestions & run with it the Elon Musk Hyperloop style way & if I/we don’t see any progress on these plugins by the community than we will take up development of these plugin suggestions when we have more available time on our hands in our UE4 Plugin Development Division of Binary Sword Pty Ltd
P.S. Bring this thread up with who might be interested in this potential plugin/s undertaking
Your ideas regarding project management integration within UE4 are wonderful. I will be investigating this further, to see if a request of this nature has already been reported or not. If it hasn’t, I’ll be adding it as a feature request.
All of the suggestions provided by our community are excellent choices to use in the meantime.
I have taken it upon myself to go through the Nevigo Forums (creators of articy:draft 2) and seek out the only UE4 thread that I could find access to and provide this reply:
I would also say this would apply here once more yet would be much more of an undertaking so I would say odds are pretty low on that kind of plugin/engine extension coming onto our internal roadmap anytime soon…
Hey Folks, my name is and I’m working at Nevigo, the company behind articy:draft. So it’s great to read, that our software supports your workflows so well!
But HeadClot is right so far. I have to admit, that it’s not the strength of articy:draft to manage single tasks of your game development like Trello does. Trello is a very fine way to support
your work with articy (I do so for my private projects as well). I think you can benefit most for your development using articy:draft combined with further taskmanagement tools, like , Trello and so on.
And yes, we’re totally open for your suggestions and feature requests. Your interaction with us, as a developer, really helps us on our way.
For myself as a UE4 as well, an integration / plugin / whatever of articy:draft <-> UE4 would be a blast
So sorry for the shameless self-advertising But I can totally understand your demands.
If Epic is implementing this suggestion, I think it would be interesting if it were an online service (a web system, for example).
With that the engine does not become a Bloatware, and also users could access your online project, anywhere in the world (like a Trello).
And if he had any ideas for a character or scenario etc … would be enough to access the website, instead of opening the entire engine.
It would also be very good if we could invite other users (with registration on Epic) in order to participate in our project.
By the way… you CAN create Levels in articy:draft (in the location editor) but you have to write down your code for transforming the Vector2 coordinates into Vector3. So it’s good for blocking out your level. (As long you’ve got the code )
While a good idea I feel that may troublesome, I for one would only go for such a system if we had the ability to control the hosting and maintenance of the website behind our own firewall/server, while also perhaps having a Cloud version.
With that being said though, you’re looking at something which would require too much overhead on Epic Games part and 3rd-party developers should step in such as Nevigo among others to fill that demand (if there is one).
My suggestion was more based from a UE4 standpoint, where it would be an additional benefit to be able to draft out map layouts in a 2D top down stencil type mode before converting it to BSP brushes, this would be particularly useful for those familiar with vector editing tools or who just wish to make use of a tablet e.g. Wacom Cintiq/Intuos.
That way by it being built-in by default it will be universally accessible for anyone who is just using the stock version of UE4 with no 3rd-party middleware/plugins.
To throw my hat into this, I like the idea of having some storyboarding tools in the engine.
In particular, if it would be possible to add a robust timeline tool, ala Aeon Timeline (doesn’t need to be that detailed) that would be awesome.
Very few tools let you define custom calendars or multi-year time span timelines, and you often need just that very thing for games. It would also be consistent with the other types of storyboarding tools mentioned here (articy:draft’s ones).
