Hi everyone,
The Unreal Engine Preview builds are one of our most vital tools for catching bugs and validating new features before the official release. We’ve created a quick survey to understand if the Previews are relevant to your workflow and industry, and what we can do to make them more useful.
Take the survey now (less than 2 minutes!) https://epicgames.questionpro.com/t/ARiAJZ7SEx
Let me start by saying I have been using Unreal Engine in one form or another since Unreal 1 1997 or 98 so a long long time. I love the engine - I love Tim, Epic, etc.
Just an idea but you could start paying people to test your code and finding bugs in the community, give out rewards to critical bugs, and critical contributions. Google does this type of thing, so do others. It wouldn’t even need to be a lot of money but just as a thank you for the time and effort. Turn it into a game. 
I have been waiting years for certain parts of the engine to be fixed and reported bugs in the features for years with no response. I know that this particular feature is a very low priority and wanted to use it anyway so I accepted that this would be broken and not production ready for years. The last 2 versions have totally broken this feature but I can see the direction and expect that it will have a large improvement next year. Me reporting this thing that very few people care about has been done and I feel I would be annoying people by continuously reporting it.
The feature is the Text3D which I am spawning and using as a part of my scoring system. It had LOD issues, Font Issues, now it has BP node issues. I had to surgically remove all the connections to it to even get my projects using it in both 5.6 and 5.7. This isn’t a complaint it is expected I am using non-production ready code for this one thing because I like it and that is all on me.
My hope was that Epic would use this feature in Fortnite so it would actually become production ready. That has been your pattern for the last 10+ years.
I tell everyone that will listen that if you stray from the “Golden Path” of what Epic does in Fortnite that you are taking on the responsibility of fixing that block of code because that is your Epic’s pattern.
You have teams out there making a living just fixing things in the engine that people need to be working but lack the engineering talent to fix on their own to get them ready for shipping a game because they can’t afford to wait for Epic to find all the issues and fix it for them.
This is the reality being on the outside for me and many other indies with very few resources. I know you guys want to fix everything you can but are limited by the products that are your focus and have to sort of hope in many cases that a new feature is bullet proof before it ships but you also know that nothing is bullet proof until it has been abused by developers and then customers playing the products and twisting and pounding until it breaks. That is the reality of all game development.
Start posting Release Dates. I hate guessing when the new features we need will be available. It makes it very hard to schedule things..
There should be a better way to give feedback and help fix errors/bugs/typos. For example, I have seen three or four different typos in Nodes from Blueprints and even in code, and I have no idea if there’s even remotely anything similar to a ‘feedback channel’ or if there is ANY simple way of giving feedback regarding these things.
The reality from my perspective:
They have it but you never know anymore if your report has been read or if they are doing anything about it. They used to do this but it seems that they are just automating it all. Who knows where it goes now.
What I suspect is that Epic is using versions of the engine far beyond ours with bug fixes that we might be a year away from getting but are focused on Fortnite and other projects.
They focus the engineering to keep the money coming in and we are the BETA testers for new features, we trade our time for free access to the engine and I am sure somewhere whom ever is working on a new feature gets the reports for that feature and those reports are factored into the internal feedback loop, then prioritized as tasks. I would expect this to be tightly managed by Tech Directors and Producers. They would all go broke and we all lose if they leave the ivory tower.
You or I can’t really expect Epic to expose their programmers to a giant flood of ■■■■ which is what it appears to them. Most of the data is trash to them as most people don’t know how to write a bug report and reproduction steps in a way that is useful with out creating more work.
The best way that I know and this is sort of a bad weather report on features is to see what is being checked in at the source level and which bugs are being fixed from outsiders and Epic for the upcoming version to be released. I am not the only person that figured this out I talked to some other engineers that do the same thing. For my last company I was a TDD Tech Design Director but we didn’t have spare engineers so I reported what I saw to the CTO so we could make plans for features we need and new builds to get.