The Issue: Communication
I’m absolutely exhausted going through features and devices that have been fully frontend implemented but do not work.
Time and time again I find a device or feature in UEFN that show all of the options, and even have associated digest functions but aren’t fully implemented, but there’s no way to know because it’s not documented anywhere.
I’m not sure why the development releases and lack of documentation functions the way that it does, but as a user it’s an awful experience. Having spent nearly 1,000 hours at this point using the platform I’m still constantly having issues where I find a feature, try to implement it, check the documentation, check the forums, struggle through multiple hours of testing, just to find out that even though its been added to all of the interfaces and there aren’t any indications that it wouldn’t work… that the feature simply doesn’t work as stated.
This most recently happened to me with the persistence settings on the timer device. They do not work and there is no documentation on either of these pages to indicate that:
Additionally here’s a bug report on the forums from a month ago about switch persistence:
And another one:
This also is happening with Save states with the new Save Device, how they function in regards to Edit Sessions, Private Islands, and Published Islands. The lack of information surrounding for how impactful of a feature it is makes no sense. View model is another example, I really wouldn’t be hard pressed to continue because it’s so rampant.
Solutions:
You could have someone manage the documentation properly, or you could add a section in the documentation page that gets pushed from developer notes, or really any number of solutions surrounding baseline communication. It’s just at the point where so many aspects of development updates are undisclosed that this has to be addressed. I’m simply frustrated and tired of wasting hours having to figure something out that would have taken someone on the team 15 minutes to write.
Alternatively, you could just not include them until they work. Why features that are unfinished are even included in public pushes is actually beyond me. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that aggressively rolling out unfinished features without proper documentation is worse than just taking the time to do them correctly. I’m not sure where this ‘hurry up to hurry up’ developments stemming from, but we’re a user base of creators and developers not end users who’s attention you may lose if we have to wait another 2 weeks to have someone properly document the changes.
In Closing:
UEFN and developing on this platform brings me great joy, but my lord is the state of communication about the platforms capabilities and updates in an awful place. I really hope that we see this turn around and the priorities start shifting towards diligence in communication and organization.
-Lion