Unreal Engine Unusable for Production

Who do I talk to about issues that make the engine entirely unusable for me and my team?

Endless loop of Compiling Shaders (cannot work having shaders recompile after any edit)
Shader Editing not really real time (cannot work waiting for previews)
Gigantic project and cache sizes make each project require its own storage unit
Temporal AA creates unusable sand looking grain out of any foliage or grass/effect which makes rendering polished final work footage unusable
Assets locked into .asset file makes VFX work between engines and other industry tools untenable as we require a shared library for all media assets
Updates break all previous projects, leaving months of work to be fixed and updated to support the latest engine releases
Key features are randomly deprecated, making them unreliable for long term projects
Out of the box engine renders at low quality, resulting in having to reset the entire settings for hours to provide HD level content

Other than that the tool keeps getting amazing features, we just wish we could use them as we require a rapid turnaround and cannot wait for the engine to complete numerous tasks before we can continue to work. Many of these issues have been noted for over 1 year now without any timeline or dev interest on them. Online solutions for these issues have been researched and do not work, so we are left to use other tools while watching the amazing projects that 1 or 2 other companies managed to get out of the engine. Hopefully this feedback has some interest over there since we would like to use the engine for future projects.

Also, if anybody would be so kind as to answer, please provide working solutions if you have any, rather than justifying the issues or telling us we are the only ones and that the tools are perfect for you.

The whole point of using UE for VFX is to have instant turnaround without any waiting for loading or rendering, which at present we find impossible.

Thanks for your time.

I can anwser few of those:

2> Shader editing is never real time because they need to be valid it first of all, compile and send to GPU, Material graph do this faster then text shader editing actully. If you want faster and more smooth solution then make one parametric material and use Material Instances insted, this way you reuse same shader for multiple materials that does same thing and changing parameters are way faster then compiling shader and resending it to GPU. This is actually typical Unity workflow so if you used to that then do that. This also potentially can reduce issue of point 1 as editing material instances won’t trigger recompilations as well you will have less shaders to compile.

5> reason why ue4 use that format is they way asset management is constructed, it’s based on UObject serialization which makes asset editing and managing in the engine way easier as in most cases it’s really seamless. VFX conversion out of it self is hard as you dealing here with diffrent VFX engines, regardless you will need a tool that converts and you can do this in UE4 by making custom UFactories and import VFX files from other enigne like any other asset. I know japanese do that with MMD (IM4U plugin) and VRM (VRM4U), many studios make there own UE4 tools too in C++ and there also Python options and editor widgets (but for importing oyu will need C++… but please don’t be afraid of it)

On point 6 and 7, thats why anyone gonna tell you that once you in deep production you should not change engine version, Epic always say this. If you need you should update project right away after update is relesed and fix all deprication warnings right way (what what they are for to begin with so you can fix them up), do not wait for few version because more things gonna be incompatible and update of project harder, but in general you should not update project at all once you in production, you should ask yourself do you really need those new features. This is common to all engines practically. API changeing so engine it self can improve without restrictions, like browsers have for example where pusing new feature takes sometimes years to transition.

8> I really don’t know what you mean by that, you can do HD content straight away or else you specifically make low quality preset project when you create project (there option for that). Go to project settings rendering and set anything you need, you can also copy ini file once you do that and paste it to new projects. Keepin mind UE4 is quite complex engine and have ton of rendering settings, obviously default one may not fill your taste.