Understood, and I also hope for some more substantial tooling. I like what they have going on with the Unreal Engine issues for sure, great direction. I do still feel as if there’s a disconnect in understanding what the goal is here and as i’ve outlined in my updated semi-annual update: Fortnite Has Crashed: The Very Sorry State of Bugs (Yep, Round 2)
I think that there’s a missing frame of reference here about who the user base for these products are and how capable they are which just results in Epic failing to provide adequate support for a sprawling and evergrowing userbase, simply due to taking the wrong approach. The thing I’d really not like to see is inadequate solutions and excuses about being unable to handle requests while continuing to try the same solutions as if somethings going to change. They need to pivot into leveraging the developer/user base they have to contribute to the management of these issues at scale. We could just keep saying its in beta, and its impossible to answer all the questions, or we could implement the solutions that we can identify working in other environments, it’s really just up to someone to make that decision.
I think something that anyone developing games knows to be true is that sometimes you have to kill your babies. Not all plans or ideas are good ones, and if there is a solution that is made aware to you cough star citizen forums cough that is simply a better implementation than what you’re currently working towards, well…
My observations and suggestions come from a lot of time developing in UEFN, time talking to people in the community, time in my profession, posts of employees I’ve seen on social media platforms, and while full of assumptions I would say have a fairly scientific method being applied. I’m open to being wrong but I have yet to have someone come out and challenge claims I’ve made or otherwise reason with me as to why anything I’ve claimed is untrue. They also include observations not just from my time developing on UEFN but posts that I’ve read back into spanning 5 years on the state of Unreal Engine. I am not just making noise because I personally want something I don’t have (although that’s part of the reason) but because I believe I’m identifying pain points of the company that they’ve been failing to solve and I’m trying to explain how I think those pain points can be alleviated with as tangible and reasonable examples and communication surrounding them as I can come up with (while still being able to make a wheres waldo image to point them out of course).
Generally, I’m just trying to champion change that I think will be beneficial for the platform of developers and Epic as a company. I understand it may or may not happen now or later for a bunch of reasons that I don’t have vision into, but I think my due diligence as a power user of the platform is to be vocal about what I feel is missing and hopefully it makes it into topics of meetings and influences the platform in a positive direction.
I try my best to think about Epic as a business and what their perspective on things are but at the end of the day I’m just a user on the platform and have to play my role, which in this case is advocating for missing tooling that is making my life much more difficult to live without.
I think I get the big picture as much as I can with the information I have, there’s just an inevitability to the diminishing return on self awareness here. Regardless if I know all this, I still have to do the same thing in any case based on my original intention, which is make valid complaints on the forums.
I could undoubtedly be less of a smartass about it, but you really can’t take life too seriously or its not much fun at all 