UE4 Roadmap

General Feedback & Requests
416

[=BlackRag666]
There are three things on the roadmap and none are the one that should actually be there. “Fix the bugs”

Bug fixing is something we continuously do release over release. We ccould add a card for it, but we’re going to be continually fixing hundreds of bugs in every release as we do now. :slight_smile:

[=BlackRag666]
Every release since around 4.12 the engine has gotten wore and worse in terms of stability. “Blueprint Weirdness Syndrome” now strikes in nearly every project. Blueprint structs are essentially time-bombs. Steam voice chat was busted in 4.15. The nonsensical “***** has to have ‘Simulate Physics’ enabled if you’d like to AddImpulse” message still spams the logs. I still can’t spawn objects in a c++ constructor like I could in older versions. In recent months Answer Hub staff have gotten less willing to try to repro anything or even acknowledge a problem. It takes two months of people complaining to get a bug report entered.

I’d love to know more about the issues that you’ve outlined above. Can you link me to any reports in PM? I’d really appreciate it, thanks!

[=BlackRag666]
To be honest, communication with Epic staff was great during the first couple of years after UE4 released, but now meaningful responses almost never occur. Nearly every staff post starts with some kind of platitude and glosses over the real issues.

I apologize if we’ve let you down in terms of communication recently. We take sort of matter seriously and will do our best to improve an open line with the community.

[=BlackRag666]
I feel I should mention I nearly exclusively develop for VR now. At all 3 companies I do long-term work for, I am a VR dev. PLEASE STOP SHOVING VR GIMMICKS INTO THE ENGINE. VR Editor will never not be a gimmick. I don’t want to stand up and strap on the headset while I am working. Your engine is becoming nearly unusable due to major bugs that aren’t being fixed while you completely over-focus on VR.

[=]
Well… that’s entire point of the discussion. You are all in over VR. Which looks like people are tired of.

As mentioned before, VR is only one of many avenues in which we provide valuable new features to developers, and we’re doing a ton of non-VR specific work for people making non-VR specific projects. Take a look at what’s on the way with 4.16 to see what’s in store for animation, physics, platform support, rendering, asset management, audio and more.

[=BlackRag666]
If you want to put something more specific on the roadmap, then “Placeholder-class catastrophe” Error blueprint (self) is not a PLACEHOLDER-CLASS que…ment-4112.html and “All my child blueprints reset” https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...ariables-Reset are good places to start.

is an that the team is aware of and looking in to. The roadmap has always been a place for upcoming features, not necessarily for the showing the status of bugs. Bug status is currently tracked over at issues.unrealengine.com, but we’ll discuss ways to better surface information on them if is inadequate for the success of developers. Let us know!

[=Teak421]
Is it possible that some people actually use the VR Editor? Probably… Why would they make it if there was no demand for it?

[=BlackRang666]
I know not a single dev that uses it. I can’t imagine any scenario it would be useful for. The only explanation I can speculate is that a higher-up at Epic ordered it and refuses to acknowledge its a waste of resources. I would use Visual Studio: VR Edition before I would use UE in VR.

Teams are, in fact, using it! For building worlds in VR, it’s a great way to quickly get a sense of scope and scale. While it’s certainly not for (especially those not working in VR at all :slight_smile: ), developers do see value in the tool.

[=]

  1. Okay. What’s on the roadmap for 4.17?

The current items that we know are going to make 4.17 are listed on the board. It’s short today, but is just the beginning. Expect more to show up there are we’re confident with be in the release later in the summer / fall.

[=]
02. To start Epic needs to stop playing hide and seek with upcoming features. I know a major part of game industry is surprising the audience, but there’s a difference between the consumer buying the games and those in the development community who need years of time to actually develop their games with your engine for whom your tools are failing. The culture of secrecy needs to stop and we need to work together

[=]
How does keeping more behind scenes help anyone ?

Secrecy is absolutely not the focus of and I apologize that we allowed things to be taken that way. The older roadmap was setting developers up for failure in a number of ways.

I am sorry that our tools are not meeting your expectations. I encourage you to post your feedback about Unreal Engine 4 on the parent Feedback for Epic forum. In the meantime, I’ll investigate what we can and can’t share due to potential volatility in our development schedule.

[=]
It is as possible as winning in lottery I guess.
My answer as to why such lets be honest useless for majority of developers features are developed.
To have something to show on GDC. Remember unveiling UE4 ? Yeah me too. Remember Kite Demo, next year (that was big and really got lots of people excited).
Do you remember what was on GDC after that ? Me neither. There was something about VR, but entire GDC was about how VR is the future.
And year GDC, was pretty much the same as last year. The only thing I remember from it are physics and animation, audio stuff and thing that did (well it’s better than last year…).

Both GDC were more focused on enterprise than core game developers.

The Kite demo was an incredibly exciting project for us to work on. Unreal Engine 4 was, in many ways, in its infancy in 2014, and Kite gave us an excellent opportunity to explore our tools and build out enormous systems and features that the engine had not yet refined (or had at all!). Between Kite and Theif in the Shadows, we were able to bring forth a lot of the systems and features that developers use today in their projects every day.

GDC 2016 saw us finalize a number of rendering features put in place for Paragon such as realistic cloth, hair, skin and other character specific items, and we were also able to take Sequencer out of the oven and put it to use with a number of partners at the show, creating a path for many to build out cinematics for their games. Our work with McLaren that was revealed at GDC brought forth a number of new options for making realistic materials and allowed us to release the automotive material pack for free based on that work. For VR, we were happy to show off the VR Editor, Bullet Train and Trials on Tatooine, as well as a ton of other partner content in the VR lounge in support of the new VRDC portion of GDC.

past GDC saw the release of Robo Recall and its full source. What’s super cool to me about project is that it helped us harden a number of non-VR specific features such as Blueprint Nativization (which we recently covered on Twitch) which provides an avenue ton gain significant performance, the hardening of out-of-the-box mod support (check thread for more info) for building expandable games and provided a robust project example for developers to see our approach (grab the entire project from the launcher) to many aspects of building games. We were also extremely glad to share the animation, physics and audio work in our tech talks (those that you mentioned, a lot of which is coming in 4.16), as well as showing off platform support for the all-new Nintendo Switch.

Regarding enterprise applications, we are definitely seeing more and more uses of Unreal Engine for applications outside of games. It’s really to us all that creators of all types are able to bring ideas to life with our technology. Rest assured, we’re going to continue building out leading ***game ***technology for our licensees and our own titles. Our commitment to game developers is strong and will remain that way :cool:

[=]
But even worse, year features trailer for engine, was almost the same as last year. There was no bomb drop like Kite Demo since two years!

The features trailer speaks to all parts of the engine, whether the features are new or not. Kite was the first time we got to build out a solid features trailer, and of course we’re anxious to see it evolve over time with you all :slight_smile:

[=]
I’m personally interested in few things:

  1. What happened to arbitrary gravity direction ? There is pull request sitting for like year or two now…
  2. When Landscape tools get some love (GPU painting, more advanced materials out of box).
  3. Support for dynamic in editor level streaming (loading levels by hand is PAIN).
  4. World composition tools improvements and origin rebasing inside editor (also without manual intervention).

Thank you providing these concrete examples. I’ll look into what I can find out here.

[=]
What is going on with things like that:
https://twitter.com/BrianKaris/statu...72258639740928
These are really interesting things.

is more technical approach than a in itself. I’ll see if Brian can write up something for the blog when it’s in a place to talk about!

[=]
I still think there should be some voting system for community request features like I mentioned previously. Gathering votes over period of few months is not representative. Giving unlimited amount of votes is also not representative.
How I would see it working:

  1. Gather requests from forums/answer hub (which you guys know you can implement, but don’t know how many people really want them).
  2. Create pool, and give like 5 votes.
  3. Make pool available for two weeks. Let vote over period.
  4. Reset pool and let vote again.

See which items received most votes every time, to see what is most trending. And then implement those features.
Repeat.
I think it would be most fair. There won’t be overblow of possible features, will clearly see what will get implemented, people get features they want, and Epic get props for listening to community. is happy

We will continue to investigate methods in which to gather collective interest in new features. The voting on Trello was failing both us and the community for a number of reasons, but we do recognize the value in mechanisms like voting.

[=Emeraldcoast]
Arbitrary gravity directions has almost the most votes on the roadmap for years now.
It would be one of the most important and beneficial features to implement in terms of player movement in game.
Many devs in forum argue for years now for that to happen and it even got a concret release date 2 years ago just to get pulled back into the backlock 2 month after the post of the concret release date,because VR seemed more important than a good landscape/level editor or arbitrary gravity options.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...for-Characters
que…r-charact.html

How is behavior listening to the communitys needs ?

The inability to accurately provide a timeline for features such as is was failing the development community in a number of ways and is a core reason we’ve made the change. While features like arbitrary gravity is something that we’d like to add at some point, we don’t have a clear path to get it on our roadmap and won’t until it gets slated for a release. Once a is slated for a release, then it will be added to the roadmap as opposed to everything living there for an undefined amount of time.

[=]

We do not have a say in what’s going to be in the engine, @Chance_Ivey . Because most of our bug reports/ requests from last year are still backlogged, unless it’s been something that perfectly aligns with Epic’s internal needs. We were all trying to get a little more attention to backlogged items, but everything got wiped from existence.
Same as when people were asking for Marketplace improvements, they got a 24 hour delay on the sales report instead, and staff left the Discord channel, cutting off the little remaining communication.

That simply isn’t true. I have many threads in the feedback section, most features being what comes with other engines right out of the box because they’re absolutely critical to majority of developers, but there is no instance where we asked for a similar tool and it was added.

https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...Lighting-Units Frostbite/Cryengine have it.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show…-Spline-Decals Frostbite/Cryengine have it.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...mbient-Cubemap Frostbite/Cryengine have it.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...h-pen-pressure Frostbite has it.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...scape-painting Cryengine has it.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...formance-issue Frostbite/Cryengine have virtual texturing.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...s-more-control Cryneigne/Unity3D marketplaces value sellers much more.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...rketplace-Team …
Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-35097) Untouched bug for 8 months with 40 votes.
que…ouldnt-be.html was marked as solved 3 times in a row last night, while the problem is there and very obvious.
Unreal Engine Issues and Bug Tracker (UE-43093) Probably soon to be backlogged bug report.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...natives/page11 There are many threads regarding RT-GI. Community wants it. Frostbite has Enlighten/Unity has something/Cryengine has SVOGI, Epic removed SVOGI.
…

That’s examples I pulled off from my side only. Absence of those features have added tremendous amount of labor to our team.
How much hope one should have in order to stay motivated and continue giving feedback/make requests.
Maybe ask the CEO to read through such threads sometimes before talking about community.

Thanks for providing concrete examples of community requests. While I cannot speak directly to why some of these will or won’t make it into the engine or how some of these decisions were made, I think AlexanderP outlined how we approach implementation in one of those threads:

  • "1. Community interest: Threads in the Feedback for Epic section, AnswerHub reports, social media posts and votes on the issues page help determine that. Please keep giving feedback and make sure to specifically explain how you would expect the tools to work for the best results. The mesh editor is an example of a tool made from these kinds of requests.
    1. Large audience need: tools that help out a large audience are prioritized highly. Sequencer, Niagara, Audio Engine and other tool overhauls fall into category. is probably the highest priority in general since it helps so many people.
    1. Epic Games project need: One of Epic’s projects needed it, so it was ported over from the game into a engine tool. AnimDynamics, VR Forward Renderer and Behavior Trees were created for . These get added a lot since the tool is already done and it’s just a matter of porting and testing."

While we cannot guarantee every request that comes across makes it into the engine (as much as we, too, want all the things), I can say that your asks do help us plan and build out important pieces of / improvements to Unreal Engine.

Thanks for your comments and concerns. We’re continually looking for ways to improve our offerings with not only the engine itself but all of the supporting products alongside it, so feedback like is meaningful.

Also I’d like to ask again for debate over things outside of the Unreal Engine roadmap to continue elsewhere. Let’s also continue to keep the harassment of eachother out of these forums as well. Thanks!