It is just me but i have the feeling that Epic have abandoned user support?
In my particular i have post serious problems to my projects. Some of them are for clients. The last time i posted on answerhub i received the answer “post on the new bug form”. So i did. But the problem is still there.
I check the forum and answer hub periodically an there is a lot of thread questions and problems without an official answer. Most of them there is users trying to help with an answer. Myself included.
So the feeling is that we small developers are abandoned. And i look at other forums like Unity and they grow by their community. I hate Unity but if i have a problem with a product that i must deliver and my the economic future of my company depends of it, i will have to choose other engine.
Again, maybe it is just me. I am sharing this to check if it’s me only. But if it is not, this is a signal to alert
A lot of the unanswered posts I see are either duplicates of problems that have already been reported, or are people seeking help with things that are not bugs/problems with the engine, but rather problems with their own code, which is not something for Epic to answer.
Well… This is the main reason why CryEngine is dead.
Meanwhile if you post anything, anything really, on Lumberyard’s forums then someone somewhere from Amazon will reply or search a solution for you.
I still use UE4 because I kind of don’t need support anymore anyway unless it’s a problem related to graphics programming; As a GFX programmer I am a greate McDonalds cook.
That and it was widely usable, poor documentation and basically sucked.
There seems to be a bit of unrest at the moment looking about the forums, I’ve used UE now for a couple of projects and I’ve actually enjoyed the experience. There’s stuff I wish it had (like a proper real-time GI solution) apart from that it’s been cool.
Not sure what’s next on the cards for me, a lot of new cool stuff in Unity… Amazon LY seems to be making steps forward, I’ll see what’s shaking.
1 month until GDC! It’ll be interesting to see what all the big engines have to show off.
CryTek and Atari are shaking… like a fish out of water.
Current move is they’re both launching they own bitcoins, seems like everybody wants to be zynga now, but skipping the game part and going straight to the microtransactions one.
I guess they didn’t see the abyss bitcoins are falling in right now…
Internet… Internet never changes lmao
CryEngine dead not because of forum - it dead because of difficulities in using it. It takes a lot of time (more than UE4) for someone to be making something useful out of it. And also because of licensing - they are much stricter than UE4.
Who is talking about forums?
CryEngine is “dead” because they didn’t support the people willing to develop on it. Now it’s too late…
Forums are just a tiny part of “support”; Epic is deep busy trying to not fall appart under those 30 million Fortnite players that they have absolutely no time to deal with engine users and Fortnite is gonna take a few years to die out, when games reach that scale they go a lifetime like Dota and League of Legends. So unless engine users help each other, not much is going to change for the people trying to use Unreal Engine without official unpaid support when project goes south.
Everybody have issues with CryEngine, and if you don’t pay for support, forget about CryTek helping you… People are worried about UE4 going same route.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it… I’ve gotta admit though some bugs and interesting features being pushed to the back burner seems a little off. If they really needed revenue from internal projects they should of just kept the $20.00 a month charge, let’s believe an article that was published in 2016 saying there’s 1.5 million users @ 25% (which seems to be Unity’s active / retention rate at least) they could hire well over a hundred staff just to do nothing but bug fix and add features irrelevant of whatever they work on internally.
The engine still profits off their internal releases and royalties, in this scenario everyone remains happy bar the people who’d be extremely annoyed at paying $20.00 a month again. **Or **maybe a priority support version of answerhub with more direct involvement from Epic staff? I’m sure many of us are happy to contribute and it offers something other engines currently don’t (well I suppose CE does). Neither may be the best answer, but one can only recommend…!
I really like Unreal and Epic but there seems to be a paradigm shift… I remember straight out of beta the Unreal staff were everywhere super enthusiastic about helping everyone (Just like the LY staff are at the moment). I was getting responses by the hour in some instances (it was Unreal), compared to Unity at the time (before 5.X) who just shut themselves off completely and seemed to stop trying… I mean a lot of the stuff I’m seeing here happened over there, basic functionality wasn’t being added… Bug fixes went into a black hole for years some times if it wasn’t “highly voted” (in short if it didn’t suit their mobile users) and the engine was going stale, when Unreal first came out there was uproar and you should of seen some of the threads.
It was the swift kick they needed and it paid off.!
Now there’s beta access (that I had to fight tooth and nail for originally because a project was in flux), weekly patches, upgrades galore and they’re finally sorting out some of the core issues that plagued the system for years. Unity certainly ain’t what it used to be, IMO it’s becoming pretty awesome across the board… It’s not there yet for everything but it’s not far off either,
Not saying Unreal is “going stale” as it has an incredible amount of functionality but I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the logical highly requested things like additional C++ documentation etc.
I understand it’s hard, just like every piece of large software systems become more complex… User bases expand and constantly demand more which can become like white noise and it’s difficult not to loose focus / branch. As much as I like new shiny features (which is a somewhat necessity to keep ahead of other engines) for most commercially viable developers it’s the bread and butter stuff that matters the most like stability, ease of use, documentation; pretty much anything that can push the chances of getting that game out to the market.
Epic must realize this because they do the exact same as a lot of us but on a larger scale, the major difference is smaller developers simply can’t deal with the amount of work needed to maintain such a massive code base and it almost becomes a symbiotic dependant relationship (as one will build an eco-system around an engine). No matter what i use for X project I will always come back to what I’ve invested the most time in. In some cases this applies to larger dev’s, I’ve spoken to a team who worked at Disney and they don’t entertain source access any more…
Apologies for the long post, it would be a massive shame to lose faith in such a great product that’s been lovingly crafted from Epic plus developers who put their heart and soul into it for quite a few years now, I understand it’s business but there has to be a human element too and one has to realize some businesses are dependant on Epic . i doubt anyone from Epic will read this but just note for all the potential negativity there’s a lot of support as well (even if it’s not mentioned as much)…
As a plugin developer, people are emailing me questions about engine issues because apparently they can’t get answers or help somewhere else.
This is bothering me, I’m not engine QA, I don’t work for Epic.
And if small devs can’t find support from Epic then clearly something is wrong. After all those 5% are still there.
Another Andy Serkis talking head 2.0 
Meanwhile we are still waiting for some basic features to be implemented so we wont have to suffer… Oh look Unity has had them since forever I guess now i need to hire another engineer to implement those…
Meanwhile Forward rendering mode has stagnated in development more of my budget gone on even more engineers… Unity has that covered too…
Meanwhile the only saving grace we have for UE are BP’s… Unity catching up on this in a year I wonder if we will still be here by then with not so empty pockets…
But who cares about making games lets get another “photo realistic” girl model running on a 10K rig to showcase what we can do with scans and SSS! 
I am worried about Unreal engines future. As a business epic needs to focus on Fortnite with the billions it is making. If the epic game store becomes a success then that takes even more time and resources away. How often does valve release games now with the success of steam?
Small developers have never been entitled to support from Epic (and it’s seldom really been given either); if you want support, you have to pay for it.
I keep telling people - the biggest mistake Epic made was advertise UE4 as an engine that small studios or indie developers can work on. Rare exceptions aside - it’s not. It’s a very heavy-weight enterprise engine that requires a lot of knowledge of its inner workings and a lot of dedicated staff to maintain your codebase. Unless it’s something like Tappy Bird, you’re not going to get very far with UE4 in the real world.
Doesn’t unity require a lot of knowledge of its inner workings and the codebase is hard to maintain as your project grows?
I think the same can realistically be said of any game project of reasonable scale, regardless of the platform.
90+% of Unity users will never reach that scale since they make “small mobile games” with tiny levels to render.
For the other 10%… Well take a look at their 2019~2020 roadmap.
It’s going to be a completely different engine from the Unity of 2~3 years ago, they’re basically building their own Unreal Engine at least on the most core things (but animation tools are still going to suck there).
Looks like the experts they’ve hired are building a custom COMPILER with support to a custom subset of C# that’s going to generate machine code for multiple target platforms… That custom C# compiler will make possible to write C# as fast as C++ without the crashes you would get when you make mistakes in C++… Quite impressive.
Right now, everything is compiled to C++ to generate machine code, but their compiler is simply going to skip that step.
If they ever deliver such a thing plus the visual scripting tool that generates C# code (no virtual machine running) and those things actually WORK… Well I would be very worried if I were in EpicGames’ shoes 
(or I would just focus more on Fortnite and give up worrying about this stuff lol)
I am still learning how to code so I don’t fully understand everything but are the entity component system and jobs system part of that?
Yes, but those are highly incomplete.
Maybe when they have physics and skeletal meshes rendering in ECS, that “pure ecs” thingy might become usable. If they don’t rush to ship a broken tool, I don’t think they can get that out of experimental stage before the end of this dev cycle (i.e: you develop a whole game in few years and when you’re done that is going to be experimental still).