Dear Unreal community,
I find myself compelled to start a thread like this, with a simple question in mind: is there proper support for Unreal Engine 4? I’ve been using the platform for almost 2 years now, and went back to check the success rate of asking questions to this forum. Here is what I found out:
- I’ve provided 17 answers to questions, and got up votes for 7 of them, leading to the 130 odd Karma I have (whatever that is relevant for I don’t know)
- I’ve asked 22 questions, of which I got only 5 answers
So, bottom line, almost every time I end up having to spend a lot of time to figure out the answer myself, which makes the idea of coming here to post a question futile.
So I ask, is Epic’s plan to keep this forum as is or is there a goal to put actual staff to review questions that don’t get answered by the community and provide their responses? Keeping as is means letting the community figure out complex things on their own, navigating the complex lines of code and sometimes do manual tweaks in the source code like I had to do at least once to get things working. Keeping as is means not giving reassurance for people that the investment they make in designing something in Unreal Engine will be worth it and they won’t be left stranded by some obscure functionality they don’t understand. Keeping as is means increasing the chances people will look for other options that actually provide some sort of meaningful support.
I’m clearly too far ahead in my project to make do a switch now. Would appreciate comments to understand if I’m completely mad as to my assessment, and also if there are other support routes other than Answerhub that clearly is not making the cut for me and arguably for many other people (just by looking the number of old posts that are highly relevant and never got answered).
Kind regards,
Alessandro
Thanks for the note Thompson. I respect but don’t really share some of your points of view. The tool is not for free, and Epic isn’t a charity - the 5% royalty can be a relevant fee. Also implying that the questions are not answered because they are unclear is a bit unfair - by no means I’m proposing that all questions are clear but I have seen many relevant questions, perfectly articulated, yet not answered.
All I’m proposing is that Epic would possibly benefit from adding that extra layer of support to address appropriate questions that don’t get answered by the community. They would benefit because:
- Taking my own behaviour as an example, when I come to Answerhub to ask a question I tend to scan through the questions that are there to see if I can help in any of them. If they incentivise people to ask questions by ensuring more of them would be answered, the community would be even more active and help answer many more questions (like a network effect, I believe is what they call)
- More informed and supported community means better games, more likely to generate revenues that would translate in more royalties for Epic
- There are several potential improvements or bugs that come from the community - keeping an eye on them can help improve the engine for Epic’s own games and for the community
Whether the above is sufficient to justify hiring someone to do this job is for Epic to decide, but I would have thought if they believe in the model it would make more sense to add this level of support. Or, I don’t know, add some sort of benefit or bonus for the folks who actually answer many questions successfully e.g. credits on marketplace or something like that.
I see you are a huge net contributor to the community and respect that a lot, but I do believe there is more Epic could do to help people make use of such a fantastic tool, if that is indeed the goal.
Kind regards,
Alessandro
the answerhub is a community tool and its not really something that is actively supported/staffed by Epic. there are on occasion times where staff will comment or provide answers but its main function is meant to be the community helping each other. there are ways to get more direct assistance from epic but it would require getting a actual partner license from what i can tell.
if your questions aren’t being answered then theres probably a reason, either they aren’t well explained, they get lost in the sea of questions, or maybe the people that are on don’t know either. personally ive never asked a question here before ive always gone and figured things out on my own. if theres something i dont know then its probably been asked about before or something similar has been asked. its probably not worth it for epic to hire someone to answer questions, in my experience i end up answering the same things an a regular basis. many people just want things done for them as well which can be quite frustrating.
as for all the old yet relevant questions, i generally dont work on any question that has been inactive for several days because in many cases the person who asked has forgotten about the question, found a solution, or just wont respond. so its hard to work on questions that get no input from the asker. again many of these questions are also duplicates so with a bit more searching the answer can be found.
I realize this doesnt really help or answer your question, but we are getting to work in professional grade software for free, if official support cant really be provided thats fine with me. for anyone looking to get into the game dev field for work unreal engine is a great resource to be able to use and once they are working for a proper studio then they will get the official support that they may need, in the mean time their education should fill the gaps.
Note these are my opinions and i do not work for epic. also im a hobbyist not a professional
Hi there,
As @ThompsonN13 mentioned, AnswerHub is designed to be used by the community to both ask and answer questions, but only works if the community helps others out. With that said, Epic staff do answer questions on here every day (even on the weekends from home, on their days off), but there are so many questions asked here that they would need to triple their current support staff to get anywhere near answering them all. Another issue currently affecting Answerhub is that Fortnite has become a big hit and poached most of the UE4 support staff. The sheer volume of Fortnite issues has even required programmers and artists to become part time support staff. They have, and still are adding more staff, but UE4 is quite complex and it takes time to get them up to speed.
I know it can be frustrating when you don’t receive an answer. To ensure the best chance of getting a reply make sure to use a short title that details the issue in general terms, but has enough detail for someone reading it to know what the issue is about without reading the content. For example, more people will view a question titled “Issue with particle dynamic parameter” than “Dynamic parameter not working”.
If you require more support for your project than AnswerHub provides, Epic does have custom licencing and support solutions available, but they are not free:
Thanks
to me its really just a matter of allocation of resources, basically how can one use the resources at hand to make the most money. just think theres a ton of new developers on here like you said but what is the likelihood that one will actually make a game and sell it, chances are pretty low. now of those that make and sell games how many do you think will become a hit? not many, and they wont make nearly the amount of a AAA game. so do you allocate someone to answer questions for people that probably wont pay off for you or do you instead hire more marketing people to sell games and get more AAA companies to use your product. AAA companies products are almost guaranteed to sell and they get more support, that support many times come in the form of engine modifications which eventually gets integrated which enhances the engine as a product. long story short its more reliable money and good business. now i admit there could be resources allocated to both fronts but epic is also in a time of growth keeping them busy id imagine with fortnite so who knows what will come in the future.
now as for some of your other points. when i say its free i just mean that its free to use and learn until you sell your product, of course they arent giving away their product but it is a good way to get people learning their product. ok i cant articulate that point well. speaking of articulation, the point about some questions not being explained well is just a for instance case, while many questions are articulate many are not, and in some cases the asker thinks they are explaining well but they aren’t. ive answered many questions that the point was lost in google translate. some questions are just lost in the mix too, for instance theres been 4 pages of questions in the last 12 hours (many are spam and fortnite). personally i dont come on here everyday so its easy to miss things. as for incentives there used to be some badges and things but those seem to have gone with alexander.
Thanks guys. All valid points, even if we diverge in opinions.
Kind regards,
Alessandro