Hey , thanks for sharing the feedback. Let me see if I can address some of your concerns:
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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”.
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While VR is of huge importance to Epic Games and very, very many UE4 developers, we’re totally stoked for all of the features heading to 4.14 that will benefit both VR and non-VR projects, and there will be a lot more info once the release is ready to go. When putting notes together for the Preview livestreams, we work from what is already well captured by our development leads and work from there. The items at the end of the segment were not back-burnered for time’s sake necessarily, but often times we go as deep as we can on all topics that are ready to be discussed to a certain depth. There are a ton of new features that we were happy to share with the community yesterday such as the Auto LOD tools, Static Lighting Scenarios (which are awesome), the revamp of our Animation editor(s), Live-GPU profiler and more. Expect more information on the rest of the items listed in the full release notes and other avenues post-release!
As we move forward toward future releases, we want to ensure we’re hitting the right notes for the community of developer out there. What sort of things were you looking for specifically in a Preview livestream?
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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.
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We’re currently building a roadmap of great content aimed at going deeper on the core features of the release as we normally do once a production build is in the wild. These Preview livestreams are not built with an aim to serve that need necessarily but to give everyone insight into what’s next. We hope you’ll get greater value out of the things to come.
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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.
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No apology necessary
We’re always looking for ways to improve and to know what you’re looking for in the content that we share. As we build the engine for games and experiences of all types, there is never a shortage of new updates to cover and posts like this help us better understand what’s important to the development community.
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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.
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Our goals are to empower others to be successful with Unreal Engine. What we aim for in both the Preview releases themselves and our overview livestreams is to give people insight into what is to come, gather feedback on functionality and answer questions about where we might be going next. We’re all ears for feedback on our efforts to help you achieve your goals!