Hello guys,
one thing i’ve been missing in the UE4 engine is a LTS Branch of the engine you could just stay with for a year+. Right now i’m maintaining my own branch and backporting bugfixes from newer branches on my own. While this works fine and allows me to use older versions of the engine it also takes a significant amount of time - as an indie developer you could really take a big lift from me if you would have a LTS Version/Branch one could just stick with.
Before i’ve been just upgrading my project to the latest UE4 which also takes a significant amount of time so i’m assuming i’m not the only one who would greatly benefit from a Long-Term-Support Version.
Even though Unreal Engine has no LTS versions like other software do, which is a shame, I understand that it’d come with a lot of maintenance burden.
With the upcoming UE5, what I would like to see is a single UE4 LTS. I don’t mean adding new features, large changes or whatever - only a long term support (a few years) for:
Fixing regressions
Fixing blockers / crashes
Keeping platforms up-to-date (reasonably, i.e. to be lotcheck compatible, no need to go crazy)
I understand that all efforts go into UE5 now, but there are a lot of projects already on UE4, and even though UE5 will be upgradable from UE4, let’s face it, it:
Won’t have feature parity (i.e. see the Breaking Changes doc)
Probably won’t be super-stable (based on other 4.X.0 releases in the past)
And will surely introduce a lot of regressions
I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of us who don’t need the new features (Lumen, Chaos, Nanite) for their existing projects, and would really appreciate having a stable Unreal Engine 4 release they can rely on (which is not where 4.27.2 is, sadly).
In my opinion, although every kind of LTS is a burden, the effort needed to support a 4.27 LTS seems much lower than the combined effort it’d require from all teams to fix up the regressions / debug the crashes / etc themselves (or just suffer the consequences).
I know that things never happen based on requesting them on the forums, but I thought it’s worth a shot into the dark.
Some form of UE4 LTS would be greatly appreciated.
For mobile platforms, Google/Apple update their requrements often (API deprecation, minimal library versions etc) and it would be super helpful to not worry about keeping the platform code fresh enough.
In your opinion, 4.27-Plus is now stable enough? I don’t see you very convinced in your one year old comment. I’m searching for the most reliable but also stable version of UE4. Could you share what do you think, please? You seem quite experienced.
Out of the available UE4 releases, UE4-Plus is your best bet. Sadly it hasn’t gotten an LTS, so every fix that was done since then to all parts of the engine are exclusively UE5, and UE4 remains pretty abandon-ware besides platform fixes; but if you need UE4, you don’t really have a better option than that branch as far as I can tell
But I’m noticing some plugins cannot be compatible with the 4.27-plus (I’m testing it now), if not specifically compiled for it, right? Do you think 4.27-plus has much more fixes than the last 4.27.2? (or could be a much better option, or just a little? )
I would love to move to UE5, but it has some bugs I can’t live with, like gitches in RT reflections, or destroying assets references when moving assets inside the content browser. And I only do ArchViz! (I don’t want to immagine a more wide developer suffering even more things).
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