udrive - Unreal Drive

Hi,

Firstly, it’s a free tool, so don’t expect everything to be perfect, although I do my best to support its stability and development, even for free.

I try to promptly resolve all bugs in the Discord channel. I rarely visit this forum.

I checked the builds again. On my side, everything works fine for UE 5.6 and 5.7.

The issue you described was indeed present in the version 1.x of the plugin, but I fixed it long ago in the new 2.x. Please check your version. At the time of writing this message, the current version is 2.0.5.

If the problem persists in the new version, I’ll need more details: error logs, UE version, and maybe even the minimum version of your UE project so I can reproduce the issue. As soon as I can reproduce it, I usually fix such issues within a couple of days.

It’s best to do everything through Discord.

How to build traffic based on this?Any data to be used or any outputs to be linked to traffic simulation?

Currently, the plugin doesn’t offer traffic generation capabilities. However, traffic is one of the main development priorities for the plugin.

However, here’s what you can do now:

  1. The Pro version of the plugin can generate ZoneGrpah, and in conjunction with CitySample, you can generate traffic. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJNjFzKAm98) has a few seconds of demonstration on how it works.
  2. Roads built with MetaRoad are themselves a very dense road graph. You can export them to any known traffic generation system. However, this will require C++/BP development.

In future releases, I will definitely provide the ability to generate traffic out of the box.

This is a bit of a niche snippet of feedback, but… I think the previous name was more original. Everyone riding on the shoulders of giants, slapping “Meta” in front of the subject (for example “MetaThis” or “MetaThat”) feels a bit… cringey? Unoriginal? It’s a common thing we see all the time, but it’s personally a red flag that brings thoughts of “oh boy, someone struggled with a good name, so they used a name generator or used a trending term”.

While “UnrealDrive” might not have been the most descriptive, it was at least yours and original. Jumping on the Epic naming scheme of MetaHuman, MetaSounds, and so on… well when I see a product doing this, it makes me think the creator/developer was too lazy, might be trying to cash in on the popularity of another product, may be trying to trick others into thinking it’s something official, and many other subconscious elements that you learn in advanced guerilla marketing labs. In short, it’s typically not ethical at the end of the string someone might tug on.

This sort of “oopsie” can subtly distract from what might otherwise be an awesome product/project/game/whatever… People that only observe/think at a surface/shallow level tend to laugh at this sort of logic, or even grow angry and defensive at what should be an objective and transparent topic. Naming things really close to another thing? Who cares, right? Well in graphic design, we’ll take logo design specifically, what would happen if you took the Nike swoosh and flipped it upside down, and presented that? When called out about this, it’s pretty hard to act naive or deny the lack of originality, and any third-parties aren’t as quick to defend this - and it’s because it is so surface level/shallow and easy for anyone to see plain as day.

Naming/titling isn’t always so simple, and naming something can prove to pretty darned difficult at times. In the case of “MetaRoad”, though, to me personally this is pretty shallow and easy to spot. In fact, it jumped right out at me because I saw the name as I was browsing Fab, immediately had a rapid thought process of “Wait, did I miss some new Epic thing?!”, then saw your name, and was frustrated. Bam, that short event was quick, but a lot happened. Brand disorientation, excitement quickly followed by disappointment, and then specific to me (domain experience), frustration by yet another guerilla marketing tactic - intentional or not.

As I said: this is just a niche nugget of feedback. I doubt you care, I doubt most surface-level eyes/brains care, etc. But for those that scratch beneath the surface, it might be valuable feedback for you to know this is the potential thought processes and such that can go down. This is the sort of stuff that people get paid to understand and fix. This is why rebranding happens. Marketing campaigns, disassociation endeavors (trying to remove a negative association due to bad press, for example), and on and on and on.

Like let me cut deep and roleplay a bit: “MetaRoad might be pretty slick, but now that I’ve associated it with deceit, laziness, lack of creativity, etc, my assumption is I’d be wasting my time and once I saw the codebase, knowing the foundation of the easy parts like the name are rooted in those sneaky things, I doubt I’d see anything novel and awesome - probably just more laziness and lack of creativity… bad patterns, bad semantics, copy/paste from other codebases, AI slop…

That almost hurt to write, but thought an example of what I’ve actually seen in the wild - how a lot of people actually operate when they have purchasing power and can be picky and brutally honest - that might just help bring the point home.

This is lengthy bit of feedback, but figured a thorough little dive into it would be better than a lazy “Meh, you just copied MetaThis and MetaThat like 500 others on Fab” would be more helpful to ya! I think MetaRoad looks pretty awesome and it’s on a list of assets to explore from my library, and hopefully others take the time to look past the name thing, or are the type that doesn’t tug at those strings :winking_face_with_tongue:

Hi, Very philosophical feedback :grin: .

In fact, when I renamed the plugin, I had one goal in mind: to add the word “road” to the name, because, as it turned out, many users simply couldn’t find my plugin on fab in the search bar, which was very annoying.

Also, “meta” from Greek (‘more comprehensive’ or ‘transcending’) very accurately describes the plugin’s purpose. Because in my plugin, roads are more than just procedural road generation. Every square centimeter of the road contains various “meta” data and even custom algorithms. Roads are a large, dense, customizable graph for various purposes (procedural generation, traffic generation, navigation mesh, gameplay elements, road surface information, etc.)

So, while the word “meta” may be overused, it very accurately describes the plugin’s philosophy and goals.

Hi! Thanks for the great plugin — we’ve been evaluating it and it fits our needs perfectly. The only thing holding us back from purchasing the paid version is Unreal Engine 5.8 compatibility. It’s been almost a month since 5.8 was released, so I wanted to ask: is an update planned, and do you have a rough timeline? We’d be happy to buy as soon as 5.8 is supported. Thanks in advance!

Hi,

I am already publishing a new release with 5.8 support on FAB. It will take 1–2 days.

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