I would think it be obvious that you should version your Verse changes as it’s standard engineering practice. I was retesting some NPC behavior and while I understand that the feature is still “experimental”. The navigation has gone from semi-usable to dumb (previously it would open nearby doors; now it just goes straight). Navigation results that returned reached now return blocked.
From a game dev POV, how can you expect people to greenfield new/experimental features if they change so significantly per patch? This is particularly problematic if a game dev cycle takes longer than a patch cycle not to mention the support implication. If a feature is sufficiently mature to release as experimental; would it not behoove you to version the Verse changes as to allow folks to advantage of the legacy Verse implementation? Otherwise, you should add a large label to an experimental feature that states “DO NOT USE IN ANY WAY IN PRODUCTION GAMES” to allow the reader to appreciate the fragility of said feature.
Hi there, I’m not a member of Epic staff, and I understand your frustrations. As a rule of thumb, when a device or any other feature is in an experimental stage as you know, Beta means that it is not for use in games you are developing and intending to release at this moment in time. The experimental features are purely for devs to play around with to get used to the features and sometimes they break as Epic is still working on a stable solution to go Alpha. You are playtesting the new feature, and Epic is hoping for feedback like yours to help see where the problems are in live situations. I hope this helps.
This makes little sense. Why bother to allow games to be even be published live with an experimental tag if the experimental feature is purely for devs to play around? It would seem the Occam’s razor explanation is that Epic wants its cake and to eat it. They want to push out features faster (increase diversity of games by providing more functionality) while hiding their rushed out development under the umbrella of “experimental”. Is it not unreasonable to provide feedback that they introduce Verse versioning or version their standard library instead of just forcing everyone to use the latest? It would fall in line with other projects that have a stable version and an experimental version for early adopters. Ofc, this is a lot more work and I’m sure prioritization will push it to the back of the backlog.