Why, oh Unreal Engine, why?

[NtinosFerret]

After days of trying to figure out why world partition in conjunction with painting the landscape is at its worst behavior, UE finally blew up my project.

So I was trying to see why painting is behaving bad. I paint here, the part goes gloss black, but my painting appears on the next block, in real-time in fact. Painting layers all messed up, impossible to go beyond applying one layer to the whole landscape, where it was just simple and fun some time ago. Going all over things like new minimap, Hlods, layerinfo files.

All over from the start. So, I though of trying fill layer on a small loaded part of the map to see if it will apply to the whole landscape, or at least allow me to have just a small portion of the map to start over when it misbehaves again.

Yeah. Boom. 3/4 of my landscape turned flat. A while ago, all my spline roads disappeared.

Yeah I know, backup backup backup. You know what? No. I spent my last 7 years working on UE almost every day.

UE5 made it impossible. It’s like going back ages. I can’t use VR without stuttering, I can’t make a simple landscape, I can’t have roads. I will not make another map. I will not do for a third or fourth time things I already did before.

I was about to start learning C++. But you know what? Not on this engine. It’s not for simple users. It’s for companies with hordes of experienced programmers that dive into core code and fix things on the fly. It’s no longer for simple people like me and you. I have been on it since 2017 and I have never experienced such a destructive behavior from the engine. It feels like sabotaging your every move.

I am definitely going away for a while and depending on how I do with C++, probably permanently. I know nobody cares, nobody will miss me, I should do backup yada yada yada, but I just had to get it off my chest.

I wouldn’t make this post if I didn’t think I had some of the best fun of my life with Unreal. It’s sad where it got to.

[Nawrot]

Yup in current 5.x unreal state going for open world streamed map just to have “better” skybox, imo that is pure madness.

Same with things like nanite, using that on game that you want sell and should run on average steam potato PC. That is also pure madness.

I know shiny new toys.

ps.
most (if not all) projects during development can happily be tested on traditional maps. Move to streamed when you are ready to develop world map. Yes streaming complicates a lot of things for eg, unloaded assets with some blueprints will be reset to default state. So all puzzle minigames need to remember last state somehow.

[NtinosFerret]

Fun thing is, I never had a problem with blueprints remembering their states because I don’t rely on streaming, I made a very nice saving system so I can even change levels and the blueprint counts game time when spawned and sets itself up. I had power banks filling and unfilling so I knew I had to do that.

Unreal totally failed me in making the world, which was so heavily advertised as limitless and better than ever. Project braking problems like disappearance of ALL roads or losing 3/4 of your landscape should not happen, backup or not. It’s not a setback, it’s the destruction of a project.

No problems in coding, even memory problems started to get better and I was able to make heavier worlds than before. But the “open world” streaming thingie… Such a disappointment. Perfect in theory, non-existent in practice. It should be basic in our era and Unreal acts like it forgot it all…