Sure, but I can’t see how this is related to my comment or comments above?
I was complaining on complaining in this Preview topic, not on all threads and everything. And now you’re preaching me on that 
I can take that I’m “sounding preachy”, but sometimes people here expect miracles. They **demand **miracles, full stability of codebase with 2-3 million lines of code
My opinion is: there’s simple reason for the lack of roadmap is that… Epic simply is unable to guarantee a given system/feature/fix would be delivered in the promised timeframe. Or if it would fulfill expectations.
- Unity tried it hard, and couldn’t deliver “production-ready” systems on schedule. This backfired, devs often complain about “ready” features that aren’t ready.
- A lot of software houses don’t announce precise details of future product revisions before features are implemented, i.e. Houdini, Quixel.
- Epic actually tries to communicate things. They simply can’t give you exact date i.e. “when Chaos would be production-ready” because they simply don’t know. Creating new features/systems usually don’t meet “time exceptions”. This is true even if developing features for a small game…
- When they still had a clunky roadmap (it was very working well), people were just repeating questions “why X is still not implemented” and Epic couldn’t properly reply - they didn’t know the answer or couldn’t announce things like “hey, we started working on our own physics system, but we don’t know when this will be ready, maybe 2 years, maybe 3 years”.
- UDN doesn’t provide an exact roadmap. Sometimes you’d get “current estimations”, but nothing you can truly rely on.
So… yes… I’d love an awesome roadmap with precise release goals and dates. I do try to adjust my development to engine development.
- Just I don’t see how this would be possible? Without actually delaying most of the release goals.
- It’s extremely important for my projects to have all these new features and system refactorings. So I don’t share enthusiasm to say “stop adding features, fix all the bugs”. Especially if added in the Preview topic.
The thing is, you present this like “people demand a stable build”, but “Epic doesn’t care”. It creates notion that “they don’t care, don’t fix things”. Or more things would be fixed in an audio system if they wouldn’t work on raytracing. Or similar claims
Please, take into account the fact my perspective. I started a gamedev career by working with in-house engines. I was happy if editor didn’t crash 20 times a day or somebody actually had time to properly implement tools without running to another task.
Overall quality and stability of Unreal Engine 4 are amazing, brand new standards.
- Compared to most in-house engines designed to support only single game type, impossible to use tools if its programmer didn’t come to your desk and explain everything in detail, there was never time for engine documentation.
- It’s superb if compared to Unity where devs often mention a long list of things that stop working. Or they had to revert the project to the older system or engine version.
- If somebody demands 100% stability from such huge software, he never gonna get it. We’re quite close to this 100% however. There are hundreds of modules updated with every version, and it’s not like people complain about the big amount of them…
Let’s take one of the issues mentioned in your link:
“Audio on Xbox One broken if updated a project, required massive rework and research”
Yes, because they switched to the new audio engine by default. Nobody rushed it. They spend 2 years on maintaining the old engine (very time-consuming since old implementation wasn’t multiplatform, often they had fix things multiple times, for every single platform) and that slowed down introducing the new, properly designed audio mixer. Audio team spent a lot of time to make a new engine as compatible as possible with the old one. Obviously, it’s not 100% compatible, some things need to be reworked.
- Now if you take such comment above without proper context/explanation… It gives impression that things broke for no reason! Epic failed and ignored the serious issue! Which simply isn’t true.
But we don’t even know the context… does the author use the new audio engine? If not forced, it could switch back to the old engine? Does the author is aware that switching to a brand new system (entirely different code) cannot be painless?
Another post states “Turning UE4 into more or less useless and not reliable at this point.” That isn’t exactly true for the general engine community. Could it be better? Sure, but these posts are often over-dramatic. Like the entire engine got “less useless”.
Meanwhile, I do keep updating the project to every new version. Often waiting longer (weeks) before the upgrade. Yes, I can’t consider the first final release as stable enough. If not compiling the engine from source, it’s often better to wait until the first patch.
I’m always preparing to encounter major issues that would need to be immediately fixed. I don’t issue “demands for stability”. Yeah, I had to deal with some bugs with almost every engine release. Still, an incredibly small price for getting all these new features, improvements and work of hundreds of engineers. A dream for an indie developer.
Call me “taking the superior high-ground”, but I gonna defend the opinion that UE4 is an extremely stable engine compared to all other ones and given the speed of engine development.
What they could do and should do is to release patches more frequently. Why couldn’t they release a patch every week or two? It would improve a lot if given project uses launcher build of the engine 