I’m sorry guys but for the first time since I signed up in these forums, permit me please to give you a little bit of rant.
This is not to offend anyone, or to open a can of worms, but I just felt like getting something out there after watching the latest live stream and a few others in between.
It concerns this VR trend that’s going on. Now, maybe there are some serious VR evangelists out there who may come at me with pitchforks and spears, not that we have anything against VR on the contrary more categories of games to work on in the future. But it is undeniably upsetting for some of us when in brief something like the following happens:
You guys spent relatively a long time talking about how you can do VR landscape editing inside unreal editor, but when it came to the production features we wanted to see talked about (and in our humble opinion would benefit a real world environment comparatively speaking), such as things for characters, like talking more about Physx improvements in 4.14 in more detail, (upcoming IK stuff perhaps), skinning improvements, cloth, about morph targets and a bunch of other things that were on that list before the stream ended, you simply “ran out of time”.
Now maybe at some point in the future of course all these points will be further clarified. But we couldn’t help but notice that a significant portion of your time in these very precious live stream videos are sometimes spent on things like VR landscape editing at the expense of those other important features, I would love to know how this benefits a real world production environment when any experienced artist can paint that landscape before the person puts the headset on. And if in reality someone is going to be putting a headset on to paint a landscape like that in a tight production pipeline then he or she would most probably be in trouble with the upper management for “slacking”, or with their colleagues who would be busting their butts to get the job done and would hold this person’s ears tight and drag him back to his chair to start working again.
I’m not saying these are bad features or it should not be talked about. However talking about these at the expense of much much more important features that need to be talked about especially when time is limited and tutorials are scarce, seems to many of us, if you would excuse the term and with all due respect of course, a “VR PR stunt” and to many if we dare call it as it is “a gimmicky feature” sorry if this sounds a little out of place. And to us a wasted precious time from the Epic staff presenters who can share their knowledge with us on more important points even if it’s for 5 mins, which can go a long way.
I’m sorry maybe some of us are seeing this differently and hoping for maximum amount of solid info within this given limited time, maybe we are in the minority or behind the times : ), but we just couldn’t help it and we wanted to get this point out there.
Thanks again though for the effort of the team at Epic and all you guys, please don’t think that we don’t appreciate everything you are doing for the community. I just wanted to speak my mind and on behalf of many as well who feel this way from my colleagues and otherwise.
For the record if the Staff members themselves feel obliged and genuinely excited to share these features on stream despite the above then of course it is their full right. Also all this (however we think is significant or insignificant within production) may be within the direct interest of Epic itself and their target line and goals for various reasons (whether it’s PR, production or otherwise) we respect all this entirely, just sharing a thought for the moment.