I feel the need to give some weight to the cost of session load times. Every minute waiting for sessions to load is a minute I lose from testing, iterating, or creating. There’s only so much multitasking I can do while waiting before I need to feel how a mechanic plays or see how a visual looks in-game.
For me, this isn’t just about convenience. UEFN is home to numerous creators, many of whom are solo developers or small teams, building games with limited time and resources. When load times stretch to multiple minutes per push, those minutes add up to hours lost each week. That’s time that could have been spent testing, iterating, or polishing, but it’s also time that could have been spent with family, friends, or even just stepping away to touch grass (ha ha). Reducing wait times would mean better games, but also give more time back into the hands of the people making them.
I want to bring this to your attention, and even go so far as to say that this should be the top priority for Epic. I’d also argue there is a business justification here, as more games and higher-quality games will be able to ship sooner. There is already so much we can create with the existing tools in UEFN, and I firmly believe that the primary obstacle holding many developers back is the time constraint.
On average, my team is seeing about 8-minute load times per push. I’ve included a screen recording with a running stopwatch to include a visual:
It’s getting really painful to wait. Above all new features I’d be most excited if we could get session load times down. I can already make great games, I’m just running out of time in the day to make them..
I regularly experience 10-20 minute load times on sessions. I’ve begun to schedule my work flow around them, but it still feels very clunky. Even a small optimization pass would make a huge difference.
This is by far the biggest friction we’ve encountered with UEFN. We’d love to hear how and when this will be addressed. In the current state, It feels like there’s a huge penalty for buliding larger projects and using custom assets. We’ve actually ceased development on Boom Tycoon 2 for the time being as updating the project can take days to add simple features.
Genuinely the most frustrating thing about developing in UEFN. Usually I learn / research new things, put the washing out, hover a bit or take my dog out while waiting helps optimise time.
The sad part about it is that its not only verse pushes, its literally more than a 12 things. I made a list recently where I posted all the issues I was running into and the list was more than 50 items, during a 2-week observation window, all having to do with friction.
I ‘ve previously called UEFN a deal with with the devil, as we have been given a lot of powerful tools that work on top of what we had in Creative, but at the cost of instability, friction and complexity to perform tasks.
I used to be able to make a game in a single day, even expansive ones. Now I need a month for a small project. At the beginning of UEFN it took me one month to create a 45-min branching path experience, so maybe it wasn’t like that always, or maybe we want more after building for so long that our increased quality level adds complexity and stumbles into more friction points. Regardless on what it is, I 100% agree with you, in fact I consistently told Epic 5 times the past month that they need a department handling friction alone due to the sheer number of things that need to be addressed. UE is an old engine that lives with deprecated standards and when you are trying to move with agile UGC turnaround you stumble into a impossible scenario that just causes burnout.
They need to address friction, REALLY address friction.
EDIT: Wondering if someone were to compare a build of UEFN on its release and the live one, will they notice a difference in load times, both project and live edit. I do remember having a project that took 20 mins to load live edit, but that was because of my connection so idk if it is faster now or not.
