Summary
UEFN has quite a LOT of restrictions compared to UE5. Things like Blueprint Graphs, Player Character Animations & Material Overrides, AI Behavior Trees & Blackboards, and Local Playtesting are only a couple of the MANY things that we do NOT have access to in UEFN. In my opinion one of the WORST things about UEFN is the blacklist and asset exposure. Its purpose? To prevent you from using whatever props, blueprints, etc. that you want, and limiting you only to what we already have in Fortnite Creative + a bit more. If you attempt to start an edit session or push changes while using any of these blacklisted assets, or if a custom asset references one of them, then asset validation will give you an error and will cancel the operation⌠you know, an error that does NOT prevent a server from starting but is put there just to limit you.
Now if all that wasnât limiting enough, now you canât even change some hidden settings on things without getting hit with a new type of validation error: An Illegal Property Override.
This is just plain stupid. For all the time UEFN has existed, overwriting these properties did NOT cause ANY issues on the servers or clients or ANYTHING! So please tell me, WHY THE HECK DID EPIC BLOCK US FROM CHANGING THESE PROPERTIES IN THE FIRST PLACE?!!!
Epic did give us a warning that this was going to happen, and to let them know any properties you need so that they can CONSIDER exposing them. Now here is why I think that just will NOT work at all:
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The chances that Epic even sees your post asking for a property to be exposed is VERY SMALL. And even IF they do, that doesnât mean they will actually bother to expose it.
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Not every property is known, so even if someone were to compile a list of every property that is hidden that could be of some use to us, there will most likely be a couple that get missed.
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Continuing off of #2, UEFN and FNC only get updated alongside Battle Royaleâs update schedule, and âlargerâ content updates only happen at the start of a season (4 times a year). This means assuming Epic both SAW your request AND is willing to expose the property, you would STILL have to wait for the next content update, or in worse cases, the next season. This is also causing problems for people who have to deal with game breaking bugs or editor problems. At the time of writing there is a horrible memory leak in UEFN that for some reason Epic wonât push an emergency patch for.
The last problem with Illegal Property Overrides becoming errors, which also happens to occur with disallowed objects, is that sometimes you will just get these errors when you didnât even manually make an override. example of one of these that I just got today (project and asset names are just examples, not the actual name):
/Project/Audio/Explosion_Att Illegal property override: Value â/Project/Audio/Explosion_Att.Explosion_Att.Attenuation.ReverbDistanceMaxâ has an override of â1000.000000â (default â4000.000000â) for property â/Script/Engine.SoundAttenuationSettings:ReverbDistanceMaxâ on an instance of â/Script/Engine.SoundAttenuationSettingsâ. (ValkyrieValidator_Properties)
I literally didnât even change this and yet for some reason it just changed itself.
An example of the same issue occurring with disallowed objects/illegal references is that for some reason throughout my time of using UEFN, I would be trying to start an edit session but for some reason I canât because of some actor called ChaosDebug or something like that just decided to spawn in out of nowhere. I never added it, nothing I imported referenced it, yet it just decided to exist in my project. Since itâs a disallowed object, I was unable to start an edit session. To make matters worse is I couldnât click the listed objectâs name in the message log to select it, so I had to search for it manually. If that wasnât bad enough, it did NOT exist in the world by the name that the message log was telling me. Instead, it was named Actor2 for some reason. I SEARCHED FOR 2 HOURS TRYING TO FIND THAT 1 THING!!!
What I need from Epic is for them to STOP ADDING RESTRICTIONS JUST FOR THE SAKE OF ADDING RESTRICTIONS!!! I understand the need for an asset blacklist when it comes to things like collaboration assets. But when it is LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE, DO NOT BLOCK IT!
On top of all this, LET US LOAD INTO AN EDIT SESSION EVEN IF THERE ARE VALIDATION ISSUES! JUST HAVE IT BLOCK PUBLISHING!
Thatâs everything I can think of right now, but I KNOW there is a TON more I could talk about
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
Assets
Steps to Reproduce
Just manually overwrite a hidden property, then try to start an edit session
Expected Result
When starting an edit session, it should load with NO PROBLEMS
Observed Result
An error telling you that you arenât allowed to change a propertyâs value will pop up and the edit session will NOT launch
Platform(s)
ALL
Additional Notes
PLEASE JUST PLEASE LET US USE ALMOST EVERYTHING IN THE FILES EXCEPT FOR COLLAB ASSETS!!!
