Still zero support for console developers

Hello,

It’s quite entertaining to see how Epic always tries to focus on how in touch then are with indie developers and how awesome it ist. But actually they don’t care at all.

It’s been over a year now that I started to develop for PS5 and Xbox Series consoles. Until now there is zero documentation or an example project or any kind of help.

Getting around Xbox is as always fairly easy but PS5 is some crazy stuff. Like always with Sony.

A lack of documentation and help for non custom license holders is frustrating and an extremely bad sign.

We are several developers who are blocked for month now with tons of questions in the forums. No epic employee has ever been seen there and we need to guess and force our way trough it.

I know from various other developer using several engines that they all get extensive support - for free.

It’s surly not the Lack of money on epics side and they have on guarantee a documentation and an internal test/example project to verify all systems.

Now when do we see any kind of support or should we just move to an engine with support?

I’m around for nearly 10 years and the support for UE3 was okay. Since then the quality of the engine, documentation and support has started to get worse and worse every year.

Is there any hope?

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Since fortnite, documentation and communication has been in the garbage. C++ documentation is copy pasting the function and it’s parameters. You’d think after fortnite, they can cough up a few adequate employees to document. Even stability is going down.

Unless you have big bucks to get in touch with them directly, there is no hope. There’s a reason why the majority of small indie games aren’t made in unreal. And it’s only getting worse, more and more features, some not related to games at all, all shoved into this one giant pile of software.

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Not even here a response. I think it’s time to move to a Engine with better support.

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You might laught because of this but right now we are in talks with Crytek for Cryengine with custom support. As we are located just 30min away from Crytek it self.

The Documentation isn’t that great either but at least you get a direct response from a Crytek dev within 1-2 workdays. I’m wainting for nearly 4 years for a Unreal Dev response…

How can you develop for ps5 / xbox without a custom license?

For UE you don’t need a custom lizense, you just need to verify your developer status for each closed system.

Wow, I didn’t know epic gave you access to the perforce branches of the consoles without the custom license and the und.

No preforce access or udn access at all. UDN access is requested for 7 years or so. No single response!

Files are just shared via an FTP without any documentation.

Hi all.

Regarding missing documentation for next-gen consoles, I want to comment that this was neither intentional nor a total oversight, but the reasons for it don’t much matter. What matters is that I’ve discussed this with our Documentation team and confirmed they are working on addressing the deficiency. Documentation is underway and they recognize this as a priority. In the meantime, these consoles do and have had ‘Getting Started’ guides available within the private forums/UDN (depending on your access) but I know these aren’t as robust as full documentation, and we can and will do better.

For clarity, full documentation is available for the other consoles, and provided to those given FTP access.

Regarding technical support for those without a support agreement, I recognize the challenges but there’s nothing I can comment on further at this time.

@PolygonArt_WEN - feel free to reach out to me via private-message regarding your custom-license requests and I can look into it further.

Regards

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Do you mean you will get free support from Crytek? If so, I have to wonder if that’s because there are so few people using that engine, that they have to give away free support as an incentive. Epic support has a yearly cost, and when I paid it, I always got answers within a few days (and always with a workaround suggestion).

But yes, the fact that you have to pay for Epic support isn’t super indie friendly either…

The engine that you give the world is wonderful in itself and no one is asking epic to give free support. Most of the issues seen in the forum and answer hub can be answered by the community ‘if’ there are active experienced users.

But there some issues for which help should come from the inside like the infamous ‘D3D / Vulkan Device Lost error’ Personally I feel that in such serious cases epic should not look if there is a support agreement. When silient in such issues some of us lose trust. (and it get networked to those near)

Epic is giving support for content creators for 1500 per year (If I am not wrong). Game developers do go deeper into the engine than content creator, So game developer level support might not be possible at that price. And opening paid support to game developers might be like opening a flood gate! If this paid support is overwhelming then it can controlled by limitting the time/questions allowed per month/year. Those who want more can asked to pay more etc. This is a method used by many firms.

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TLDR: Open paid support for all game developers. if game dev level support is not viable at 1500 limit questions or support time alloted or have option to pay more.

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@Stephen_Ellis For my part, there is no documentation available on the FTP.

Yes there is “Documentation” within the Zip files, but I would not consider a small Getting Start PDF with install instructions and a How to create a Patch PDF as any kind of documentation.

Other then this, I don’t have access to anything.

Not the PDFs; the HTML documentation is provided via a pinned post within each private forum section.

You may want to wait a bit before you run to grab them though. The recent console documentation update for 4.27 missed the CSS styling for the page formatting, but that should be fixed before end-of-day. (EDIT: the new forums are giving me difficulty with the file upload. Looking into it, but unlikely to have resolved by end-of-day now)

I just want to drop a general note that we are actively working on improving the console documentation experience: consistency between consoles, consolidation of the scattered resources into one source of truth, the pages properly hosted under docs.unrealengine.com for easy viewing and faster updates, and a self-serve team-management system to enable access for teammates. This should all be coming before end-of-year.

Cheers

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