Yes EU 5 looks very impressive. I downloaded it, found my computer was not able to use it properly; then modified my computer with new hardware and tried again. Now it runs perfect.
However, your superb game engine is not documented properly. I’m referring to the API.
WTF?! This is a first. And you’re not kidding either.
I’m not interested in making a cookie cutter game. I’m not lame like that. Without proper API documentation I’m reduced to hunting around the internet hoping someone has made a tutorial about what I want to learn about. That means I have to see that aspect of the engine, or API, from their perspective. Are they using it the way it was intended or did they find a way that happens to work? Computers are dumb. They simply do what they’re told.
Not documenting the API of an engine is one of the worst things any company can do. It seems Epic has decided to throw the API for their engine in the trash in favor of “everyone should use blueprints, yeah!”
This is childish, totally lame, lazy, and very very unprofessional. You don’t take your engine seriously so why should anyone else?
Now I understand why the majority of games are not made with the Unreal Engine. They should be. What you have is amazing but unusable.
I worked for a AAA game company. Because of the NDA I can’t mention the company name or the name of the project I worked on. Before being hired I interviewed directly with the CEO. He looked at my portfolio. I’m good at coding and developing tools that can be used to speed up development. For example I had created a 3d modeler with Unity. That standalone “game” can be used to create and export a textured 3d model. It can also load models created by other software in at runtime and use or modify them and change the textures and export it as a new model. I programmed symmetrical designing of 3d models. It’s basic stuff compared to Blender. I’ve also created my own graphic design software, before I began using Unity, that does live symmetrical drawing. Because of that I no longer use Adobe software. I have my own and don’t need to pay a subscription fee to another company to create textures/art work for my projects.
I was hired by that game company I can’t mention. After a two week evaluation I was asked to stay. I left less than a month later. Why?
They were trying to create a very ambitious project on par with Bethesda’s Action/RPG games; BUT decided they didn’t need design documents. This was very bad because they also wanted me to be on the team that created an API players could use to mod the game and use to add their own quests, dialogue, npcs, and items very easily. It was a chaotic mess! People were adding to the code and making changes without communicating with others. There was a lot of re-coding the same things over and over again, by different people, because of bugs. Their producers had the bad habit of showing up and talking about a new feature they thought would be “cool”, which had never been talked about in any meetings, and people from my team would be used to start on it. It’s like a construction company building an add-on to the upstairs bathroom of a house under construction when the building’s foundation wasn’t finished! Somehow they were hoping they could fit it together before release.
That was about two years ago and they still don’t have a public demo out for that project which they are still working on.
Bottom line… the Unreal Engine is unusable. Yes I could use it to create a cookie cutter FPS, or racing game, or some other thing you have a template for. But what if I want to create my own type of game? What if I want to create something not seen before or put a twist on a genre? Then I can’t use your engine because of a serious, lazy, and unprofessional lack of proper documentation. I’m the type of coder who would want to write code to extend what’s available in Blue Prints. With Unity I extended the engine on my computer and added features I wanted. Like I created my own graphic design app and added features Adobe didn’t have which I wanted in a graphic design app.
Unreal Engine could easily be the number one engine for game development. It’s not because of one thing, lack of documentation.
I’m going back to Unity. Unity IS an inferior product. I’m using Unity because their API is documented. I can teach myself how to use it and not depend on YouTube videos from a third party. I can extend that engine and make it do what I want. It IS an inferior product to Unreal Engine but at least I can make apps people want to buy with it.