Hello everyone,
The Epic Developer Community has been live for six weeks now and we’d like to provide an overview on some of the recent updates, as well as outline what is still in progress and planned for the months ahead.
We’ve seen a significant increase in community and forum activity—you’ve posted hundreds of tutorials and snippets and asked loads of questions. For the first few weeks we focused primarily on urgent bug fixes, small feature updates, and we’ll admit, a little vacation. Since last week we are back at it in full force for phase 2: solidifying all existing features.
Thanks to everyone who jumped in and contributed to an exciting launch! We’ll continue to roll out updates and are reviewing all the incoming feedback.
Listed below are a sample of the recent and upcoming changes you’ll find on the Epic Developer Community:
COMPLETED FEATURES
Favorites
You can now mark tutorials and snippets as favorites, and these will then be displayed on a special tab in your profile. You must be logged in to be able to see this option.
Tutorial Up/Down Votes
Tutorial posts now have up and down votes. You must be logged in to vote, and only upvotes will be displayed publicly. Content authors can see both up and down votes on their own content.
Snippets will receive this same functionality at a later date.
Tutorial/Snippet Header Changes
We’ve tidied up and restructured the top section of Tutorials and Snippets pages to help make them cleaner. More iterations on this to come!
GIFs
GIF support was added to Tutorials.
Snippets Editor
We split the snippet editor into two different modes: personal and advanced. The Personal tab contains basic and quick-fire options, meant for creating snippets for personal use or sharing with a small set of others. The advanced mode provides more options, and is designed for more robust snippets that are intended as long-term examples or building blocks for others.
Extra Snippets Features
We have added the ability to insert one extended block of text, one image, and one link to snippets. We hope this helps you explain what your snippet does or how it should be used.
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Other items
- Published date and time displayed alongside search results (Deploying shortly)
- Many minor UI and design tweaks and adjustments
- Updates to display accurate post count numbers across ecosystem and mitigate old topics from intermittently surfacing to the front and forum landing pages
- A few security updates
- Additional small issues and bugs resolved
IN PROGRESS
The following items are works in progress and may be completed shortly, while others are a preview of what to expect in the coming months.
Tutorial Discussion Topics
For each Tutorial, a forum topic will be automatically generated in the name of the author, with the tutorial and the forum topic linking to one another. The number of replies will display at the top of the tutorial post.
This is already partially rolled out, but there are still a particular issue we are working out, which is why you do not see this feature on every post just yet.
Snippets will also receive this same functionality at a later date.
Localization
We have added in, and already deployed, language filters, and now support “link groups” for Epic tutorials, facilitating the ability for all related localized content to be aware of each other.
We are currently working on porting over the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean localizations for a lot of the Epic content, courses in particular. We are also happy to share that we will start offering Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and French translations to content in the future!
Localization for the Epic Developer Community site itself is in progress, so keep a look out for additional updates here.
SEO
To ensure content surfaces in search engine results and is easy to find for you all, we are working on pagination and server side rendering first and foremost.
In the future, we’ll likely update our URL structures for even further optimization.
Support for products beyond Unreal Engine
We are working on updates to the design and our backend to support more dev tools beyond Unreal Engine, such as support for Epic Online Services as an example.
Tutorial Improvements
Work is scoped for improving the filtering of content and surfacing outstanding content, as well as many quality of life improvements to the tutorial editor itself.
Community Heroes and Badges
The Community Heroes and badging systems need backend work to help us automate badges for you all. A dedicated page that showcases our community heroes, outlines what badges you can earn, and how to receive them is in the works.
