Reminder that UEFN is a slowpoke of a software, with most regular actions taking minutes of waiting to do in a high-end PC with 1Gbps of a connection.
I am going to list some friction points that simply make us have to wait instead of developing, would love if waiting was chipped, even a little, from all of these:
- UEFN doesn’t open from the .exe anymore, which was faster, now it needs to open through Epic Games Launcher, which is also slow.
- Opening EGL takes a while.
- Pressing library button on EGL has no click response, and a delay
- Pressing the UEFN button on EGL has no click response, and a delay
- Opening UEFN takes a while, then you have to pick you project when the project browser shows up eventually. Would love to have that show up at the start when you click UEFN, that way you can wait once instead of twice. Its annoying have to wait, then click, then wait. At least let us do a chore in the house and do all the waiting once.
- After it finally opens, you want to change the scalability, you have to wait on shaders to compile (although I love the part that this only happens once, so kudos for that)
- Then you remember you left a material in another project you have, that you want. So you click open project, and wait for the other project to open, then wait a little more cause UEFN is prob doing something behind the scenes without telling you, but then its fine, the editor fps goes back to 60 and you can work.
- So you right click the material you want, press migrate, then select what you want to migrate, then send it.
- Well now you cant simply open the other project, no you have to close UEFN and go through the list of what I just mentioned, to see the assets you just migrated. Fun
- So you do all that, then you set the material into a plane to see in game, then you open live edit. Depending on your project, you have to wait from 2 - 7 mins for that to happen.
- So you load in, check your material, now you notice there a weirdness on it that you forgot to fix. So you tweak, but then you have to wait 2-7 mins for that one edit to be seen.
Now this is the average experience of us using UEFN. You can make your own conclusions into what % of time was used in development, and then just waiting. And I left out a lot of extra cases, like duplicating materials, or opening UMG loading plugins that we don’t see but have to wait on.
All this waiting takes away from the immersion we feel while developing a game, and lose our flow having to break our process so many times. This is why UEFN doesn’t feel as fun as Creative, because in the latter you never have to wait, except when loading islands. We used to be able to make a map in hours (and I did a couple in under 4 ) with Creative, but now my typical project with UEFN starts within the month (large projects never took more than 4 months in Creative, here its 5-9 months). And since I ve developed more than 150 experiences in Creative, I see the difference and the friction to every click I make in UEFN.
UEFN needs to be UEFN IMO, not UE running on plugins. This will also allow Epic to truly prevent map stealing and access of unwanted content. Also, let us launch Fortnite while UEFN is open, we shouldn’t have to open live edit then back out to lobby simply to check whats happening within the game, this is nuts.