- What can we say?
None of us were expecting a rollercoaster like this, but amidst the chaos there was actually a lot to like. We wanted to take a moment to acknowledge some of the good things that happened, look ahead to what’s coming up, and to thank all of you for your continued support.
While you might have noticed some of the changes and improvements we made to the Unreal Engine (UE) documentation, there are bound to be a few things you missed. Some of our highlights:
- We ran the first-ever official docs survey last February. Your responses directly helped us prioritize our efforts and brought visibility to the user’s biggest needs.
- Epic has heard you by making a huge long-term commitment to docs, nearly doubling the size of the Documentation team this year. We have additional dedicated resources coming on board for more areas of the engine all the time (and for Epic Online Services too!). We’re also still hiring, so if you have Unreal chops and you want to help us in our mission, get in touch!
- We also brought in @echo_four to help us handle all the feedback and specific problems you’ve been giving us in this forum. Keep them coming!
- We made a long-overdue overhaul to the site navigation, reorganizing all our doc content under a new set of categories. We believe this will make it easier to find information day to day, easier to put the information you find into context, and easier for us to spot the gaps. It’ll also give us a better structure to grow into as we add more material.
- We heard your feedback about the wiki being decommissioned, so we took the opportunity to bring some of the most-requested topics into the official docs. So far, this has meant drafting a new guide for Setting Up Dedicated Servers, updating our String Handling and Structs pages, and we’re in the middle of a major overhaul of our Gameplay Ability System docs. We hope to migrate even more helpful pages in 2021.
- Last but not least, we released massive updates to support the 4.25 and 4.26 releases, increased the volume of docs we ship on release day, and even shipped localized docs on release day for the first time.
We’re really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish this year, but the work’s not done by a long shot. 2021 is looking to be one of our busiest and most ambitious years yet:
- UE5 is coming! We’ve already started working on early docs, and planning how to bring our thousands of pages of UE4 material up to date.
- But don’t fear, we won’t be forgetting about continuing to improve UE4! For example, we’re synchronizing with the Online Learning, instructor-led training, and Education teams to join forces around creating a single vision for onboarding new customers.
- Epic has some other new toys lined up for you to play with next year. We can’t spill the beans here, but keep your ear to the ground…
- We’re looking to make some improvements to the UE forums, and to the feedback mechanism in the docs site.
- We’ll be doing the doc survey again this February, with some changes that will help us zero in on specific areas. Even if you did it last year, it’ll be really helpful to hear your answers.
Thank you all again for your help and support. We really couldn’t do it without you. Looking forward to talking to you all again in 2021.
Cheers,
–The Unreal Engine Documentation Team