Why is most of the stuff in the marketplace not compatible with unreal engine 4.9?

[DarkS474]

@;386797

Yes, we reserve the right to remove content from the Marketplace if it’s unable to be maintained with new versions. It’s in our agreements with each seller that they keep their content up-to-date. Everyone that bought the content will still have it and be able to download it, but it won’t be visible in the catalog to people that don’t own it, and they won’t be able to purchase it.

On our end it’s a switch we flip to enable that version compatibility, but we don’t flip it without first verifying that it does work without issue. For pure meshes\materials there’s rarely any need to update the content. All content creators need to do is add it to a new engine version, make sure everything is hooked up correctly, then email us at marketplace-support@unrealengine to verify they’ve tested it on the new versions, and we’ll flip the switch and add the compatibility in the catalog.

Yes, we’re changing to a new policy that will require you to submit updates (if any) for each new engine release. Fortunately though, for meshes and materials, there’s pretty much nothing to be done but drop it into 4.9, make sure nothing breaks, and to tell us. For Blueprints, it might require some simple updates based on what’s new in that engine version. If you could verify your content is compatible and drop us an email at marketplace-support@unrealengine, we’ll get it updated ASAP!

So here’s another peek behind the curtain to explain the change: Before 4.9, for every new release the Marketplace team would stop almost all other work and manually test every single piece of content on the Marketplace for compatiblity, then flip the switch to update the compatibility. It would take a solid week of time, and was extremely labor-intensive, but it ensured quality. However, between 4.8 and 4.9, the amount of content on the Marketplace nearly doubled, and we simply can’t afford the time to do all of it ourselves any more, and still maintain everything else we do. We’re in the middle of shifting the responsibility fully to the sellers to verify their content works, and then we update the content and compatibility when we receive the update from the seller. This is really the only way we can scale, and fortunately it isn’t very much work in 90% of cases.

I am sorry but to avoid all of this couldn’t you just add backward compatibility to Unreal Engine itself? So that assets/plugins that don’t get updated would still work “automagically” (a word known in the SCSI world) ? Of course most or none of the new engine features wouldn’t be used but at least the assets would still be usable without modifications even with a performance hit due to the obvious internal translations/mappings you would have to enable to make those work when something has changed.

Yes you would have to add some new layers of code in order to make such a thing work but you would avoid having to break compatibility for both projects and assets in the marketplace between new Engine versions.

If you keep releasing so many new Unreal Engine version each year that change critical things so much you end up having to do a lot of extra work yourselves and oblige both developers and marketplace assets developers to do extra work and extra checks on everything as well.

Adding a translation/mapping layer to ensure some backward compatibility would ease both your life and that of your customers. Or not ?