UE4 Editor Terminology: We need your feedback!

General Feedback & Requests
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Terminology, Features, and Things I Was Confused About With Unreal Engine

Here’s ones that threw me off:

Cascade Vs. Particle Editor

Persona Vs Skeletal Animation Editor

Matinee Vs. Animation Editor/Animation Track Editor

Landscape vs Terrain (When tools for both existed which was newer and why Landscape was working and Terrain wasn’t when everyone mentioned Terrain creation and most Terrain creation tools call it a Terrain and not a Landscape and landscaping people think of when they mow the lawn more so.)

Blackboard Vs. AI Logic Script (The terminology of single AI pawn with Follower Blackboard with Behavior Trees, Blackboard Asset, and the works.)

Behavior Trees Vs. AI Logic Blocks/AI Logic Conditions/AI Decision Blocks (When I think of Behavior I think of the actions with attitude.)

Blueprint Vs. Visual Code Schematic/Visual Script Schematic/Visual Scripted Object

Authority Vs Server (When the reference is to a Client and Server relationship even though the Server is being defined as Authoritive.)
Actor, Pawn, Controller (The seperation of which when normally the 2 Pawn and Controller would be combined and contain much of the functionality and can be posessed via basic core logic.)

Locomotion Definition (Which handles the animation logic in motion but also represents the animation event drive from sequence, when the drivable animation sequence can be relative to the resounding function of the animation itself, when in other terms it can be used to represent the function of driving Physics often with gravity forces applied, for instance to keep ones feet grounded and ground level that is adaptable with using IK.)

And I was confused on the acceptable input value range at first when it came to the unit declarations and what value types were actually excepted for the input text fields, confusion was first caused when I found the acceptable input values in various fields amongst the different tools varied in which not all values would work in one field as for another when they featured the same required input types, in which should have been for instance double precision variables.

It was like you know (4 + 4) = 8 and the input for one field accepted an answer of 8 while the second field only accepted 7 as the value, thus, making the result inconsistent.

I could think of some other’s, but for now is good enough.

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As I had a run-in here, Scene component could use a rename…

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Hello, I come from a programming background (mainly C++) and speak English natively (sometimes that matters with understanding terminology). I’ve spent the best part of 15 years buried in Visual Studio, but I’ve never worked with any of the Unreal engines before, so is all very new for me. I’ve been going through the documentation and tutorial videos for the past week and have tripped up on a few terms, some of which I’ve forgotten now (should of found thread earlier).

I agree with the sentiments of a number of other people in thread, such as KnightTechDev. Why do basic tools like a Particle Editor need to have fancy names, like Cascade/Niagara? Why can’t it just be called Particle Editor. The number of times I’ve seen a word like Persona and have had to stop and think… “wait, what’s that again?” or Matinee and thought… “is that an alcoholic beverage?” Terrains for example have been called that for decades by many tools? Why are they now Landscapes?

Why is the position of an object in the Transform component called Location, instead of Position? I can’t say I’ve heard many people refer to a 3D vector in 3D space as a Location.

Why are dynamic lights called Movable instead of Dynamic? I’ve never heard someone refer to a dynamic light in 3D rendering as a moveable light. one actually stumped me for a little while and I was concerned that UE4 only had static lighting until I discovered that Mobility/Moveable actually meant dynamic light calculations… who’d of thought?! I’m currently watching Zak’s Introduction to Blueprints video series and even he calls it a dynamic light when talking about it. In fact, why is that property under Transform, and called Mobility? In every 3D tool/engine I’ve used a Transform always refers to a 3D position, rotation and scale only. For example, a camera would have a transform, but wouldn’t have a Mobility property as it is not a light. Shouldn’t the Mobility property be under the Light group and be called something better to indicate that its lighting calculations are dynamic, hybrid or static? Isn’t a light’s ability to be moved/adjusted at run-time implied by its very type, i.e. dynamic vs. static?

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Just wanted to chime in and say that Blackboard and Behavior tree terms are “industry standard” for AI guys. So mention blackboard or behavior tree to any AI programmer and he/she knows what you mean. is one case where Epic hasn’t just wonked the name to sound all glitzy :slight_smile:

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Disclosure: Just started using UE4, my background is Unity.

Still very early on, but I want to focus on the Actor, Pawn, Character, and PlayerController.

Actor - to me is fine, it is a different name from what I’m used to, but just means something that has a presence in the world.
Pawn - something that I can control, also fine
Character - humanoid pawn (according to docs:.unrealengine/latest/INT/Programming/UnrealArchitecture/index.html), starts already to get a bit murky because I could see a character be something that isn’t humanoid like a spider. Tbh to me is a problem of the documentation, to me character is more like a “pawn simple movement logic”, when I see humanoid mentioned the thing that pops in my head is biped
PlayerController - is the one that makes no sense to me.

PlayerController makes it seem like a class that handles your input - and in fact input gets filtered by it before reaching the pawn - but even when I’m looking at documentation, the examples are done using the code in the character and not in the PlayerController (.unrealengine/latest/INT/Gameplay/Input/index.html).

Talking with a friend he pointed out to me that class should be seen more as a Player, i.e. a representation of somebody playing the game, so to me it would make more sense to be called Player , HumanPlayer and AIPlayer.

Regards,
Nuno Afonso

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One thing that just struck me in regards to feedback is if someone at Epic could make a chart for what the lifetime of things were (gamemode, game state, player state etc) it might be helpful.

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Some nodes like TexCoord (material node) can’t be accessed by that name that I’m always reading and associating them with.

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Oh yea… I was reminded of an old one that confused me when I first started out. When initially setting up collisions I was thrown for a loop because I read settings like “BlockAllDynamic”, and I originally thought it mean it would “block all dynamic things” not that it would “block all” and it itself was a dynamic thing. Perhaps if these were “BlockAll/Dynamic” or “Dynamic BlockAll”

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PlayerController, PlayerCharacter, Pawn - in what’s discussed in post, it seems that there are separate copies of rotation data? I’m thinking of the Gears of War series where you kick doors open, and in cases like , it seems the logical way to have it set up.

Oh right.

In the custom settings for , you can change the type of physics object it is, and then the flags for what (other types) to collision-check for, if I’m right. But I only know from previous experience with Bullet. I feel needs to be made much more obvious somehow.

Strongly agree with

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I don’t know. Even though I understand that some things aren’t that obvious a lot of Software do have used different terms for a similar application. Now having worked before in UDK the Transition wasn’t that confusing to UE4 of course.

Now having some more of a Marketing Slang to some of the Tools, is not that bad and it just takes a bit. I mean how many times do I need to know that UMG is for UI, that Persona is for Animation. It adds anyway to the experience and is much more playful in my opinion. Having things like Particle Tool, Cinematic Tool, Tool for Tools makes it … waaah.

I like the terminology very much and there might be some things that needs to get used to.

But since is about giving some feedback to help, I would clearly let the Editor Tutorial give a complete Tour over all the Tools. Kind of a Tools Overview and include most used Terminology and than add of course Links to the appropriate Documentation.

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Please don’t!

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Aside from the fact it would probably be huge undertaking, to find and crush all those spots in engine where current coordinate system is assumed as is…

Why not ? Most software use Y-up.

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Because as a one-dimensional Unreal Engine fanboy, I’m used to it. Plus, 3DS and a few other bits of software still use Z-up and I find it unlikely that it will change. Doubt it’ll ever change because as you say, it’d be a ridiculous undertaking. It would break more than it would fix. EDIT: Also, DirectX is technically Z-up as well.

I don’t know, I practically disagree with everything everybody has said in thread so far. I don’t think there’s anything particular confusing about any of the terminology. Arguably, calling ‘Pawns’ Characters then makes the end user feel like all they can use that class for is two-legged walking bipeds. Pawns are like Pawns on a chessboard, you interact with each one but you’re not physically “it”.

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I know is a blunt sentence but; I’m very against making things “plain English” (if such a thing exists) to cater to people who can’t be bothered to spend the time learning such basic things, especially when it makes perfect sense for those that have. By all means spend time making that information more widely available, but don’t change it far into the game. For instance, GameState is a term that’s been around since the 90’s, why on Earth would you change that 20+ years later?

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Actually changing some of terminology after almost 1 year the engine released, is a bad idea imho. Because community tutorials or answerhub has tons of solutions about some problems or tutorials with those names. For example after you change persona or cascade to something different, beginners will have a lot trouble to find old tutorials or questions about them and they will need to find they had old names too.

Yea names are a little bit confusing when you just start to unreal engine but it’s not that hard to learn them with the documentation or from tutorials. I came from unity too, and people comes from unity, wants names like they see in unity engine. But most of them not familiar to unreal workflow or classes. (like the ones say “pawn” should be “character”). I think it’s better to learn the engine how epic uses it because they have the most experience both with editor and unreal API. It’s like when you try to learn another 3d software, if you try to imitate or bend your new software (especially shortcuts), like in your old software is always the worst idea. Please just don’t change the engine for english speakers understand easily (like animation editor) because engine is not for every english speaker, it’s for game developers and radicalizing game developing for any english speakers will make current developers to learn things again (like changing actor to something different will make trouble for API too) or finding old tutorials and answers harder.

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That and don’t forget that some of us worked with UDK a long time actually have been used to Cascade, Matinee etc already for a long time.

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Yeah plus that :slight_smile: I tried udk couple of times and even i remember those names, the only new thing is for me persona actually. I don’t think any community tutorial video will be updated to terminology change, or even answerhub. So some of those tutorials and answers will be gone to under dust. is whole bad idea maybe except couple of things. But i disagree almost every word in thread like .

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If the idea of Y-up bothers some people so much then they should be able to understand how much having Z-up bothers others of us coming over from Unity and Y-up apps. Outside of the arch-viz world there are more apps that use Y-up than Z-up. Best of all would be to have it be configurable then everyone can work comfortably.

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Configure in code:
object.position.z or object.position.y ? How do you see the configuring of , swapping dlls? recompiling whole editor for one axys? Im sure devs acknowledge the fact its really hard to live with such
“huge” cause of cognitive dissonance but the problem is far beyond just changing the way axis are displayed.
tldr: it is big and tedious process of gathering and processing information on which parts of engine will be affected by change, and i assume almost every part will be affected.

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I don’t know what the solution might be from a technical standpoint but the question of Y-up vs. Z-up was one of the things mentioned in the examples in the original post. We were asked for feedback on user experience and I would rank lack of support for Y-up operation as the biggest negative thing for me in my user experience with Unreal.

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Initially was something that bugged me a lot but now I am using UE4 a lot, I find I can switch between Z-Up and Y-Up apps quite easily, C4D and Unity (Y-Up), UE4 and Blender (Z-Up)