Some ideas for creating more efficiency for game devs

The Unreal 4 team is INCREDIBLE in terms of the speed of development, which is awesome. The downside to this is that the ‘meta’ info that we game devs need to maintain in order to be effective is increasing pretty rapidly, because there are usually a few ‘gotchas’ that we need to keep in mind when using some of the tools as they change and are introduced between versions. This can create a lot of inefficiency when doing development.

All this is perfectly understandable, but it ends up making development far less efficient than if could be, and I think there are a couple things that could help ‘close the loop’ a bit.

**1. Public bug tracker for bugs that have been acknowledged on answer hub. **

Typically when troubleshooting, the loop goes something like this:

Look it up on answer hub>Find a thread where a dev acknowledges the issue and submits the bug sometime in the past.

At this point, it’s an open loop: we users have no way of knowing if the bug still exists without reading the patch notes for every version between this version and the latest version. Often I see people posting and asking ‘is this fixed yet’, which takes up even more of Epic’s time in updating.

There needs to be a central place where we can know quickly if that bug is still in play, otherwise we can’t efficiently make decisions about how to proceed. It’s understandable that it isn’t appropriate to have all the bugs on a public tracker, but for the bugs that are discussed publicly on the answer hub, we NEED to be able to quickly either rule them out, or know that they may be the root issue we are dealing with in our project.

**2. Links to community documentation from the official documentation. **

9 times out of 10 even if the official documentation is sparse or out of date, there’s some GOOD info out there in the community someplace. Either a blog post, or a thread on the forums, or the wiki. If there was a place at the bottom of the official article for any given topic, where the community could maintain links to relevant related info it would make a lot of sense. As long as it’s clear that it’s not official documentation and may be incorrect, it would be very helpful to have.

Hey Hyperloop,

Great ideas! In fact, we’re already working towards a public bug database and community updates to official documentation to help spread and maintain the knowledge.

I don’t have any definite timeframes on when either of these plans will become a reality, but it is the goal as soon as feasible.

Thanks!

Awesome! You guys rock!