Hey all, I’m glad to see that you’re all extremely passionate about where we’re taking Unreal Engine and have concerns about things like visibility into our plans. I wanted to directly address a number of your concerns and hopefully shed some more light as to why we’ve made a few of these decisions, what means for the “old stuff” on the other Trello, and, in general, how we build Unreal Engine.
[]
The new roadmap tells us less about what’s going on than the last one. Great job…
[]
Seems a little sparse at the moment. It was helpful to know that Niagara and AI physical movement were in the pipeline because I’ve been holding off implementing custom solutions to some of my problems.
[]
I really dislike new roadmap, the old one was much more helpful.
[]
There are exactly 3 things listed now there, instead of like 200 things before? And out of those 2 things, the audio engine and PCSS shadows is both already in the branch, so it’s not even something new by now for someone who uses .
Please move back to the old roadmap design. It’s much nicer to know exactly what things you consider working on, even if out of the 200 things only 50 will really be worked on. Also, the fact that there are no categories now makes it a lot worse. You really should not group rendering stuff, AI stuff, audio stuff and whatever all in one “Targeted: 4.X” group.
Really, please consider moving back to the old roadmap where we can actually see what you have planned for whole 2017, even if some of the things might move to 2018 or 2019. That’s how software development usually works, so not really an. Just not showing it at all is really, really bad.
[]
How to make the roadmap 100 times more useful in 3 easy steps:
- remove the new roadmap.
- restore the old roadmap.
- update the old roadmap.
[]
Since I mentioned volumetric fog I think its a good example of the past issues with the roadmap. It got a very large amount of votes. Sat around showing backlogged for ages with few clues as to whether it was being developed. Then showed up as being under development last summer, causing me to get excited. Then it got backlogged again and little was heard about it until it showed up in commit in the month or so before 4.16 preview was done.
The old roadmap had a lot of great things about it, but over time we began to see (and get feedback about) how it was failing our developer community by not providing any meaningful timeline (because it proved very difficult for us to predict) in which a would land. There are so many things we want to do with Unreal Engine, and many items that we have to table for a while for one reason or another. We’ve run into a few of situations where developers have put off implementing a specific for their game because we had it listed on our roadmap. Not having any sort of timeline for delivery caused confusion and frustration as it’s difficult to plan on information that can change. These are the situations that we’re trying to avoid to help put developers on a path towards success. The volumetric fog mention above is a great example of - we knew we wanted to do it, but we’re just now getting to the point to where it can make its way into the engine. The information on the cards now are *completely *representative of what is confirmed to be on the way with an actual release number tied to it.
[]
Ah, really pretty and informative as far as 4.16 release, but really obscure when it comes to the future of the engine
[]
I still wish we had list of back logged features, short terms features (2-3 months, which are worked on), and vote reset every 2-3 weeks. would allow to gather which items trending in community and better prioritize what community wants.
[]
On new road map there is no status on things like Niagara, which I bet quite a few people eagerly waiting for.
[]
So what happened to everything that was on the old roadmap and isn’t on the new one? The 4.17 section is quite short?
4.16 is still a few weeks away, and the details for the full release are still coming in. What you’re seeing now in the 4.16 list is representative of what we hope to have for each release as we move forward. Currently, the 4.17 section is pretty short, but that’s mostly due to the fact that we’re still working on 4.16 (Preview 1 just dropped earlier week) and the items listed in that category landed in that build. You’ll most certainly see the 4.17 list grow and soon! We expect new items to show up as we have our regular development team check-ins. If you take a look back at the last year or so, we’re roughly putting out a version of UE4 every three months. Since 4.16 is still a few weeks out, the items slated for 4.17 are all within that 2-3 months time frame 
[]
Information on whats going on is more important than big pretty looking pictures.
[]
I think that the limited amount of stuff on there at the moment is just because it launched today. I can’t imagine is what the entire roadmap is supposed to look like. I’m sure that it’ll be filled in the days to come. Well at least that is my hope.
[]
#1. The new Roadmap may mean the end of support for wishlist items like Large-Worlds…
(Doubles+Unity3D-Camera-Blending) or Runtime-Terrain or Spherical-Terrain / Navmeshes etc.
We’re not changing our plans or what we would like to work on or deliver in some future release, we’ve just moved to a format that provides a more accurate view into what is going to be in your hands in a few months. doesn’t mean the end of wish-list items at all.
[]
How does ignoring community’s wishlist, ignoring backlogged items, removing community votes, keeping things behind the scenes, aid the development of our projects?
[]
How is Epic today being any transparent and making things more accessible to the community?
[]
There is enough feedback on the matter already so I hope Epic really meant it when they mention they love feedback.
[]
Lets not play any games. Are we going to have ANY say in requesting features or not? If not just delete specific forum. Take your ball and go home.
Features that the community wants are of great importance to us, and we welcome any requests to be posted up one level on our Feedback for Epic forum where many of the developers and dev leads spend time (and the Unreal Engine Community team
). is by far the best place for you to request features, raise concerns and take part in helping shape Unreal Engine 4.
A quick aside about VR development: There’s a lot of discussion here on VR features and their overall benefit to technology, and we’re certainly all in on VR. However, the technology we build for VR rarely comes at the cost of other engine features and often adds benefit across the board as mentioned by a few here. We’re continually building a vast number of non-VR specific features that benefit game and application developers of all kinds, not just for VR 
I hope that provides a little better picture into the “why” behind some of the changes, and we hear your feedback loud and clear in your comments here, so thanks again for lettings us know what you think. I hope to have addressed some of your concerns and look forward to hearing back from you.
Lastly, let’s try and keep the harassment of each other to a minimum… We’re all developers here trying to make great things with the toolkit and many of us are passionate about different pieces of technology, features and markets, but thread should remain focused on the roadmap itself. Thanks!