You’ve probably noticed that we’ve recently begun previewing our forthcoming learning portal. We are in the planning stages for our 2019/2020 courses that will appear there.
Now is the time to tell is what you’d like to see! We want to hear from you on what kind of courses and topics we should be creating and what is important to you!
Please take a few minutes to tell us in this short survey. (@2-3 mins). In the coming months, we will be posting a follow up survey focusing on game dev specifically.
Done
I would like to find articles about The UNREAL® Way, not only technical things but how to face a new project, for example if it had to do a multiplayer card game, or a sport game, etc. but I’m not asking for a template, but something at a high level of how to structure the classes
Actually that sounds interesting, it would be great to know how internal Epic teams handle some projects, what guidelines do they stick to, what rules are best to adhere to, what’s their high-level workflow, etc. And I’m not talking about obvious beginner things like “let’s prefix files” and “use source control”, but a more intermediate overview that can help studios migrating to or starting with UE4. Thinking about it, if it’s done well, it could be more useful than anything in that survey.
Especially how to create advanced stuff. For example creating a custom Editor for a custom UObject class (i.e. creating a graph window, how the nodes are translated to code etc)
After being on forums since 2016 and reading a lot of threads, more info on how to produce C++ plugins with pixel shaders and compute shaders would be a great help for people coming from other game engines and also technical people (not artists).
Seconding this - in-depth engine spelunking that explains the inner workings on the rendering pipeline, input pipeline, networking etc.
But one thing I’d love to see more - Production Workflows. The Engine is just part of the story, I want to know how you guys use it in your production pipeline. A few examples of what I mean:
In some talk someone once mentioned that you move your HLOD actors to the Persistent Level in Fortnite and effectively use those as entire-sublevel-impostors. I would like to know more such level optimizations, aka how you use your own tools in your own projects.
I know you use GameSync with Perforce to share your games among your teams, but are your projects laid out on your repos (do you have game-specific engine branches etc.) and what kind of automation tools and script do you use to build and test your projects? Do you run doxygen on your game code to generate documentation for the game similar to how the engine docs are generated? Do you have a Fortnite/Documentation folder for the project? I would like to know more about your high-level project structure and how you do the whole “scaffolding” around the games themselves.
How do you organize your assets and what tools do you use to e.g. enforce naming conventions? Do you do commit-time checks to ensure all the assets are validated, if so, how? What about the asset import pipeline, do you just import assets manually? What are your techniques for asset management and ensuring things scale properly and things are in-sync with art updates etc.
I think a lot of these could be just summed up as a “Epic’s Internal Workflows” course.
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Networking in C++ and more specifically server authoritative movement, client prediction, and especially the FSavedMove side of things. You guys are killing it with Fortnite but there is still no cohesive C++ networking course that goes farther than BP (which is mirrored by many youtubers) and a handful of partially finished or very basic C++ videos.
I recently had to shelve a VR multiplayer game because there is next to no documentation on how to setup or use any of this and the server corrections over 50ms of difference were enough to get me sick and render the game unplayable. I have all the Udemy courses but even following the one by Ben Tristram was a catastrophic failure using a somewhat custom movement system (notably jetpacks). They supposedly replaced the server/client correction system with one that was intended to have the server behind the client with packet timestamps but as soon as I used it in my project it did not work at all. The only thing I have to go off of is a wiki post from UE 4.14 and reading the Unreal Tournament source code but that is going into a grey area because I cannot use UT code in my projects.
Essentially, anything that would prevent someone like me from spending around 2 weeks figuring out why a blend-space animation has your feet dipping into the ground and how to fix it, and what the better ways of actually animating complex locomotion states are.
A really in-depth character animation course is really, really, REALLY needed.
And it should most definitely include curves?
I can’t really begin to explain how much easier it is too drive Foot IK from a curve you set in the anim vs coding from the Notify event manually… it’s 10sec vs 1 hour and a really sub-par result. Had I known about it (from reading it somewhere important like the very first link tutorial) I would have never event attempted to implement things with notifies…
And if possible, maybe you guys can consider releasing the speed warp and Orientation Warp Paragon animBP nodes as actual part of the engine. Particularly the speed warp one so that you can then make the blend-space from idle to walk an “obsolete” practice for advanced projects (or those who are picky like me?)
I think other talks could be somehow integrated into the learning portal, like the ones from Unreal Fest - many of them are extremely useful. I understand they are not the same though, so I don’t believe they should be seamlessly integrated with quizzes, but at least have them displayed in the search results, or a YouTube-style section where you can browse all talks which are approved and sponsored by Epic. This way, in order to find official quality content, we don’t have to check separately both the portal and the UnrealEngine channel on YouTube, but we could filter them on a single, global place.
I absolutely want to see more C++ tutorials. Someone mentioned “Engine Familiarization” and that would be nice. It’s annoying to constatly troll through all the engine’s API and get only the most vague answers. Atleast a code example in each would be nice. Also, PUT THE INCLUDE path at the top of each page! More often than not that’s the only thing I’m after and scrolling all the way to the bottom is annoying. It’ll save a few moments but it’ll add up. (and update your already existing C++ tutorials)
A lot was mentioned, I could just wrap around. We need advanced courses. Really godlike level of expertise. I watched around 50 videos this week for the first time ever and found only couple of them worth. This is sad even for a ‘free content’ (I understand nobody gonna teach some random dudes just for fun, but maybe, I hope and believe).
This is not content related rather functionality related. In the browser, it would be helpful to have a “cinema” mode" like many other tutorial/learning websites. Currently, only fullscreen mode is available which does not help if one has a widescreen monitor and would like to watch tutorials on one part of the screen and have the engine running in the other half. Also, watching the movies on an ipad is very challenging as they do not properly resize and it is a hassle to get to the “fullscreen” button at the bottom right-hand corner of the window.
Cannot agree more. It would be great to have everything (learning wise) in one place. Right now we have to jump between YouTube and official website all the time. It’s not so bad because you are already creating playlists on YouTube so it’s organized pretty good but I think live trainings should be included in Unreal Engine Academy too (with specific category).
Is ok to suggest improvements for the current courses?
Yesterday I finished the Building Better Pipelines (Sam Deiter) and I really missed the project files from that course, only after finish I discover that the project files exists and are available inside the More Information header section (FMX17.zip - hosted at box.com). I think it would be better to also have those project files linked at “Additional References” course section tab.
Today I’m doing the Exploring Blueprints course, the Interactive Material Swaps Using Blueprints and Blueprint for Enterprise lessons are focused on project files and changing existing blueprints samples, but I cannot find these project files anywhere. For example @0:54s the video ask to navigate to folder “Section1_Content” = Ooops! Invalid access .
Both courses work as introduction to UE4, I think is really important to have the video lessons in sync with samples files to have a easier and frictionless learning path.
Thanks
