First let me say the UE4 is the best engine I have used, but something struck me which is with 1080p screen the working area is tiny and thus relatively useless compared to say Valves hammer(old and new) and cry engines editor, and blendr, and photoshop, and well most editors now that I think of it.
So the main reason I think you (Epic) have done this is you all probably use 27" 1440p or 4k etc but for the average player/dev they have 1080p screen and maybe with another screen.
*Now it’s no longer a problem for me, I bought a 39" 4k monitor, it wasn’t something I wanted to do but it needed to me done. *
I’d say there’s a term for UI-scale-creep or UI-bloating, it reminds me of when screens when from 15" 17" CRTs to 1080p and developers thought “wow I’ll use all this space” for basic apps like winamp that didn’t need that much space and thus reduce the ability to multitask and even use it efficiently (more dead space in between to move the mouse pointer from place to place) etc.
I was and maybe will do a bigger or more in depth of some the things that need work in UE4 like market place etc.
I’m not UI designer so I can’t pin point the problems, my novice thinking is reduce icon size and like Photoshop use TAB to hide all tool palettes, and generally reduce any of the wasted space.
Also there is something very uninviting about the UE4 editor - could be the colour like steam with the grey grey grey BUT this “uninviting” issue I don’t want to be confused with the main problem of working area size, or to take focus just meantion it and I can’t put my finger on what it is I’m sure some could tho, I feel that Photoshop and hammer more inviting for example.
So as you can see the working area in UE4 is very small compared to other programs
Hopefully that makes it clearer.
Edit: more words, also this no longer problem for me as I have a 39" 4k but for the majority of people this probably a problem and if epic wants to reach all the people it can it should look at addressing this
34% of steam users have a 1080p screen; http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
a trivial matter although i have to agree, ui bloat is something Epic seem unaware of, or maybe they just like it like that.
you can drag windows around and resize them ect but everything seems over-sized somehow whatever the screen resolution.
far worse than the 3d view are blueprints,
why do we need a giant rounded box for everything? with a huge ‘title’ area? and massive gaping voids all over the place? so much wasted space. it makes working with blueprints impractical and time consuming, and its so ugly and messy.
recently i was ‘playing’ with some quite complex maths in blueprints and its almost impossible to keep track of once you get past a handfull of nodes, directly due to bloat.
when you look at something like max/msp and compare it to ue4 blueprints its easy to that bloat just gets in the way.
UE4
Max
i know which one is prettiest but i also know which one is easier and faster to work with.
after all, gamers wont even see any blueprints while playing your game so whats the point?.
sorry to derail the thread a bit, its along the same lines though.
No your right with blue prints too, blue prints on 1080p screen wasn’t great either, generally lack of work space and also anything that’s not zoomed at 1:1 doesn’t seam to select well, there’s more to it then that tho.
Also, I don’t know if any of you have used UDK in the past (Most likely you have though), you’ll notice that the UI, even though you need a second screen to use the content browser effectively, the space that you had to work with was perfect. I myself find myself constantly trying to rearrange windows to try and find the perfect usage of space, while with other engines it’s just, get on, work, done, while UE4 is, get on, work, rearrange screen, work, rearrange screen, work, done. It’s such a huge pain and I wish they’d have just kept the old layout, but make it look more modern. They were going on about UE4’s UI as being intuative, while I just find it annoying. If you don’t know what the UDK layout looked like, here it is:
As you can see, no annoying titles for everything, just simple buttons, and if you hover over them it tells you what they do anyway! UE4’s UI is quite pointless in a sense.
You know you can just use Small Icons in Editor Preferences and move all the windows to be wherever you want right? I don’t understand the issue…
Also, sorry but that post about blueprints it just BS. The example shown is ugly as sin, and gives absolutely no visual indication to what kind of nodes you’re looking at. Even C++ and text editors use basic colours to make it easier to see what you’re working with, it makes absolutely no sense making a visual editor less visual…
Case in point is the material editor, the new nodes are more ‘bloaty’ sure - but they make it FAR easier to determine what’s happening in the node graph. Things are far easier to follow that they used to be whether the graph is larger or not. If blueprint looked anything like Kismet nobody would want to touch it.
Everybody in this industry knows the unwritten law about blenders interface, in that it’s probably one of the least intuitive designs ever conceived and people genuinely refuse to use the software because of it’s interface. If you want to pick software that uses good UI design Blender should never be on the list. Plus, who even uses the content browser in the same window as the viewport… cmon guise. Separate tabs for days.
Sure, this makes sense, but whats with the massive titles in the UI in the first place, instead of having descriptions or titles that come up when you hover over a button, which cause much less clutter and create a lot more room. I personally loved having the pop up windows for when I clicked on an objects properties, caused less clutter, since you didn’t have it on the screen constantly. Secondly, UE4 is supposed to be scalable for a wide range of setups, and the content browser constantly being on the screen doesn’t help people with one screen. It’s either have a tiny content browser, a constantly rescaled content browser, or different windows to constantly minimize. I for one know the pain of having to minimize a content browser constantly since I worked with UDK for a while before I got my second screen. You’re screwed if you only have one screen, and if you don’t have the money for a second one, you’re equally as screwed
Regarding your Blueprint, it’s possible to neaten alot of that up in a variety of different ways if you’re willing to take advantage of the space around you, e.g. putting all variable work between the nodes that require it and the node before them, keeping all single rows of Nodes level, changing the order of some of your Sequence outputs around etc.
I’d think that Unreal’s UI is customizable enough that it works fine at any resolution, you don’t have to keep the content browser where it is, or the modes panel open always
You can even have the floating details panel and content browser like in UDK. Also, it’s probably not recommended (It can be glitchy), but you can reduce the UI scale in Window>Developer Tools>Widget Reflector. Which also affects blueprints.
I do think some blueprint nodes do take up a little more space than they need to though, a compact theme for blueprints as an option would be nice, but it’s definitely not a big issue, for me anyway.
