Originally posted by Maximum-Dev
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Sharp decline in Official Responses from Epic throughout the community.
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Website/Portfolio: http://www.VictorBurgosGames.com
Join me on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/BurgosGames for UE4 Game Dev. If you need help, just stop by and ask!
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Originally posted by S-ed View Post- There should be separate place for suggestions, something like UserVoice
- I think it would be nice to have optional paid support (i.e. same questions as on answerhub but with mandatory feedback)
- Bug reporting should have very strict rules to follow (ideally - bug reporter have to make a video with steps to reproduce it on a blank project)
DanielW Thanks for the answers. But IMO getting "this feature is not/won't be planned" is better than nothing.
junfanbl IMO Crytek doing it wrong. You pay to get access to hidden answers. WTF??? And paid support is expensive. $100+/hr.Website/Portfolio: http://www.VictorBurgosGames.com
Join me on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/BurgosGames for UE4 Game Dev. If you need help, just stop by and ask!
Wishlist Neko Ghost, Jump! a 2D/3D Puzzle-Platformer : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1...ko_Ghost_Jump/
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Originally posted by teak421 View PostIn addition to what you suggest above, how about documentation on the level of QT. Can you imagine how many questions would be resolved with outstanding documentation? (with examples, and the why).teak
In that sense BP is a fail, whereas C++ offers actual insights. However, only a few lucky devs are equally productive with both. If you're a small-Indie-team / solo dev, do you want to spend your time becoming an engine programmer or focusing on gameplay etc.
So please Epic, if you do offer premium support MAKE DOCUMENTATION part of the equation. Right now, its still too low a priority!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What are the BEST Unreal Tutorials / Docs? There are none tbh... Here's why
Instead its better to just take projects apart (see the free 'creators' listed here)
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Funny thing. I've recently offered Epic to make new documentation engine for them.
(I've been thinking about it for years, but just recently got some confidence)Last edited by S-ed; 10-28-2017, 04:26 AM.
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I think implementing a stackoverflow moderation would help alot.
in SO, every member can flag posts as duplicate, on hold and too broad (afaik if you have some reputation threshold) which all reduce the reputation.
Having your own threads marked as these surely encourages to overthink the question and searching for a solution yourself.
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S-ed I've been using CE since it came out, so I don't use paid support a lot. Only occasionally. Otherwise it does add up fast. Sometimes you need it though.
franktech I haven't done too much C++ development in UE4, what exactly is it lacking? Is the API documentation not thorough enough? As far as BPs go, those are great for prototyping game mechanics, but are hardly suitable for packing and shipping a game. I wouldn't exactly call them a failure. I don't think they were meant to replace good old fashion coding.
I think at some point if you aren't paying for support, then you are going to have to struggle through the process. Unless of course something just flat out does not work. That's a different story.Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build
bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce
bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. (Rich Cook)
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This is the thing about time and money when it comes to Game Development. You're either spending time doing something or wasting time trying to do it and in the end time equals money.
You could try to debug something that may not be fixable on your end for 8 hours (or days), or you could get that reply from someone within an hour, and saved yourself 7 hours (or days) of dev time doing something else. Let's say it's an engine bug and there's no way to fix it, so you need a workaround, well, hopefully the engine tech will be able to give you that workaround a lot quicker than coming up with it yourself. Or at the very least, you know that you don't need to try to debug it on your end any longer and you can figure out a workaround yourself.
Either way, a priority support system in this scenario would work for 90% of devs. The other 10% will be the cheapskates that can't afford the priority support and will no doubt be "all up in arms" about it.
Trying to please everyone is futile, but you sure could please a lot of folks with priority system in place. It's optional. The regular answerhub "answer rate" should not be affected, especially with the money coming in from Pri Support, you should be able to afford a few extra bodies.
But, we're getting ourselves a bit off topic with the pri support sadly. Still need to do something fundamentally about Answerhub Bug Reporting and Feedback For Epic.Website/Portfolio: http://www.VictorBurgosGames.com
Join me on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/BurgosGames for UE4 Game Dev. If you need help, just stop by and ask!
Wishlist Neko Ghost, Jump! a 2D/3D Puzzle-Platformer : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1...ko_Ghost_Jump/
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Originally posted by junfanbl View PostI haven't done too much C++ development in UE4, what exactly is it lacking? Is the API documentation not thorough enough?
2. Partially or totally out-of-date sample projects and tutorials etc.
3. Broken promises regarding adding more examples and wikis.
C++ examples: 1 2
BP - examples: 1 2
Originally posted by junfanbl View PostAs far as BPs go, those are great for prototyping game mechanics, but are hardly suitable for packing and shipping a game. I wouldn't exactly call them a failure. I don't think they were meant to replace good old fashion coding.
Originally posted by junfanbl View PostI think at some point if you aren't paying for support, then you are going to have to struggle through the process.
So better to keep expectations low for now, for two reasons. Why?
The numbers don't really add up. Some Reality check / guesswork:
Originally posted by VictorBurgos View PostTrying to please everyone is futile, but you sure could please a lot of folks with priority system in place.
Its likely that even with paid support, it won't be a level playing field.
Some kind of priority / system would probably begin to emerge imo:
1. Epic-Active Games / Internal Projects,
2, UDN partners and high rollers,
3. Premium engine contributors (Rama and co)..
4. Community leaders and visible supporters (Victor and co).
5. Skilled game designers or higher-profile Indie-projects (TheJamsh / Jacky and co).
So what about everyone else? Its reasonable to assume those lacking high-profile projects or badges would be further down the list at tier 10 sitting in a queue somewhere.That's just reality, and why new solid documentation is so important, because it brings possible benefits to everyone...
#2. Headcount... Subscriptions - #How many new extra Epic staff....???
For a long time Epic held off adding headcount to the marketplace team, claiming it was a break even operation. So we know Epic are vary of adding headcount, just like any US corp really. But lets say 1000 devs sign up to premium support. Lets say the cost is what the engine used to be or $20-$30 USD / month. How many devs does that pay for? Salary for a dev in NC (75-100k mid-level, 120-150k top-pro?). But the overall cost to Epic will still be double or treble after all govt-taxes / benefits / all hiring costs are factored in. So how many people will get hired? 2 Maybe!
But ok, so what-if 10,000 devs sign up? Now things are looking brighter. But there's still going to be a trail off at the end of Year1, Year2, Year3 as devs leave the program (after getting what they need) or finding out it isn't what they wanted. So maybe 5-10 new staff get hired overall. But realistically speaking 10,000 subs is a lot for this community. So at a guess I think 2 new hires is a more likely outcome, one dedicated to documentation and the other an engine-specialist / support-tech. If so, that's not going to bring overwhelming change, but the documentation might improve....Last edited by UnrealEnterprise; 10-29-2017, 12:07 AM.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What are the BEST Unreal Tutorials / Docs? There are none tbh... Here's why
Instead its better to just take projects apart (see the free 'creators' listed here)
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Ian Shadden actually explains the problems with the docs quite well during one of the streams( I think it's the fireside chat stream from a year or two ago ). He said something like with 500 men and 10 years they still couldn't get it done because the engine is constantly evolving, things are added/removed/modified, and that instantly makes them out of date or not quite right. It's one of those infinitely endless tasks. He also mentions that often times the code comments, from which the docs are generated, aren't always that great either which also causes problems.
Personally my first port of call when I'm researching something is usually youtube. Matthew Wadstein's channel, places like that( and some of the others franktech mentioned ). I only go to the official docs as a last resort.
I avoid answerhub like the plague. I think I've only ever posted there once. It's such an ugly thing to try and read.
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Originally posted by xuri View PostIan Shadden actually explains the problems with the docs quite well during one of the streams.... He said something like with 500 men and 10 years they still couldn't get it done because the engine is constantly evolving, things are added/removed/modified, and that instantly makes them out of date or not quite right. It's one of those infinitely endless tasks. He also mentions that often times the code comments, from which the docs are generated, aren't always that great either which also causes problems.
Not that it isn't true, its a fact particularly at the C+ level! Its just that its also built on a few mis-truths...
What do I mean by that???
Well imo the engine changed more radically and broke more things between 4-4..4-10 vs 4-10.. 4-16.
Whereas at the Blueprints core code level, movement / collision etc, hasn't really changed that much...
So it'd still be invaluable to get detailed documentation on these 2 topics for example... This and This...----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What are the BEST Unreal Tutorials / Docs? There are none tbh... Here's why
Instead its better to just take projects apart (see the free 'creators' listed here)
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As an engineer, providing support on these forums is not in any way required by Epic, and I handle a lot of support from other sources that is part of my job (UDN, internal projects). I'm only here because I care about improving the engine, and doing my best to help out users so we can make great things together, but I don't have much time.
I want to give my thoughts on bug reporting, from the perspective of a programmer.
With a couple of exceptions for urgent cases (the last one I considered 'urgent' related to an issue with core UBT functionality; it was ignored and persists 2 full engine versions later), I essentially gave up reporting bugs to Epic a long time ago. As ridiculous as it sounds, I often still write down some details that I keep locally for my own reference, but don't submit a report because it's an unjustifiable waste of time.
The fundamental problem is that invariably reports have to get through a support technician before an engineer will see them. I understand completely why this filtering is needed. As a programmer though, when I find what I think is a bug, I dig into the engine code to see what's happening. As such, my reports generally had detailed information about what happened, why, and generally linked to specific offending lines of engine code on Github. These reports would be dealt with by support techs without any programming knowledge, often misunderstanding the technical details, asking for full repro projects, etc. This is no disrespect to those people, who of course were doing their best to help, but the bottom line is the time investment required to get a report accepted was absurd.
The alternative is Github PRs, but in most cases, I know enough to pinpoint the bug, but not enough to be confident of the best way to fix it. I don't want to abuse the PR system; anyway, lately even PRs are suffering from the same problem, building up without response.
I think an ideal system would be to have some automated filtering of reports, so that technical reports with references to specific lines of engine code could go through more directly to the relevant Epic engineers. I realize this is squarely in the "we won't get to it anytime soon" category, of course. I just wanted to point it out though; I really think Epic are missing out on a lot of potential help from their community due to lack of good feedback infrastructure.
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As to Victor's general point, I agree the Feedback forum is definitely not what it used to be. There has without doubt been a steady decline in staff involvement ever since the UE4 subscription model was scrapped, though I suspect it's more down to the increased number of engine users and requests than any intentional change in policy.
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Originally posted by kamrann View PostThere has without doubt been a steady decline in staff involvement ever since the UE4 subscription model was scrapped, though I suspect it's more down to the increased number of engine users and requests than any intentional change in policy.
https://issues.unrealengine.com/issu...t&sort=updated
They're adding new important features to blueprints in recent releases, it wasn't always like that. And we waited long time for those features.
So I guess, we have to wait until some engine teams will be able to find time for all these community requests
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Originally posted by franktech View Post
You have to note though, how this tactic sort-of gives Epic a license to get out of creating new docs.
Not that it isn't true, its a fact particularly at the C+ level! Its just that its also built on a few mis-truths...
What do I mean by that???
Well imo the engine changed more radically and broke more things between 4-4..4-10 vs 4-10.. 4-16.
Whereas at the Blueprints core code level, movement / collision etc, hasn't really changed that much...
So it'd still be invaluable to get detailed documentation on these 2 topics for example... This and This...
Maybe Shaddenfreude can pop in and just give us a heads up on if there are any plans for improving the documentation because at the moment it can be a bit irksome. Though as I said above I do get that it's an endless task and if they have with, whatever system they're using( doxygen? ), some in-house rules about their code comments. I haven't actually looked at UE4 source at all yet as I'm still learning the basics but they must have some sort of guidelines for the documentation scraping. I know it can be a pain and time consuming but if the engineers had some solid rules to follow about the information in their comments the docs might not be quite so uninformative.
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Originally posted by xuri View PostMaybe Shaddenfreude can pop in and just give us a heads up on if there are any plans for improving the documentation because at the moment it can be a bit irksome. Though as I said above I do get that it's an endless task
Docs in an ever changing 'live' environment, has always been a challenge.
But this is the path Epic has set itself now under software-as-a-service etc.
Every corp in the same boat has the very same challenge, can't be ignored!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What are the BEST Unreal Tutorials / Docs? There are none tbh... Here's why
Instead its better to just take projects apart (see the free 'creators' listed here)
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Originally posted by franktech View Post
Lets try other devs who do docs too Richard Hinckley Jeff Wilson...
Docs in an ever changing 'live' environment, has always been a challenge.
But this is the path Epic has set itself now under software-as-a-service etc.
Every corp in the same boat has the very same challenge, can't be ignored!Website/Portfolio: http://www.VictorBurgosGames.com
Join me on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/BurgosGames for UE4 Game Dev. If you need help, just stop by and ask!
Wishlist Neko Ghost, Jump! a 2D/3D Puzzle-Platformer : https://store.steampowered.com/app/1...ko_Ghost_Jump/
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