I am a self-admitted UE4 fanboy, but even I have to admit that this is kind of beyond the "Steam-In-UE4" meme now.
The Steam OSS in UE4 is in a real sorry state of disrepair - there are endless threads both on the forums and answerhub demonstrating basic Steam functionality either not working correctly or missing entirely. For example, the infamous 'Dedicated Server With Steam Is A Joke' thread repeatedly resurfaces to the top of the C++ forum because the process is still so involved and obfuscated.
I understand that since Epic are not working on any Steam-based titles (and let's be honest, it's unlikely they ever will be from now on) - and I'd like to think there aren't any business-driven motivations behind this - but a significantly massive portion of the UE4 user base is shipping games to Steam, and while savvy programmers/developers like myself are capable of implementing this stuff - we are either unable to share our efforts because of time or contractual obligations, or in the rare occurence somebody creates a pull request it goes largely ignored until it's out-of-date.
I've found myself spending a couple of weeks implementing user stats and entitlements because the engines interfaces for this are non-existent - but I am unable to share my implementations due to contractual obligations. We've also made several drastic improvements to the Steam implementation that we are also unable to share.
I know Epic are busy - but my main purpose for this thread is to draw attention to how light-on-implementation some of the OSS interfaces are in Unreal in the hope it ends up on somebodies radar. If the OSS-system is going to exist at all, it should really be complete. UE4 has been out over five years now and we're still contending with this all the time.
And yes I am aware of UWorks and various other third-party implementations - but none of these are implemented in a platform-agnostic way, which is a deal-breaker for multiplatform games (which is an increasingly common standard nowadays).
I don't mean to rant - but the engine has been public for >5 years and I honestly think to only addition to the OSS in that time has been Steam Authentication - and even that took 20 releases to get to. The engine doesn't even update to the latest Steam SDK with each release. I'd really like to get this changed, either through Epic or via the community on their behalf.
The Steam OSS in UE4 is in a real sorry state of disrepair - there are endless threads both on the forums and answerhub demonstrating basic Steam functionality either not working correctly or missing entirely. For example, the infamous 'Dedicated Server With Steam Is A Joke' thread repeatedly resurfaces to the top of the C++ forum because the process is still so involved and obfuscated.
I understand that since Epic are not working on any Steam-based titles (and let's be honest, it's unlikely they ever will be from now on) - and I'd like to think there aren't any business-driven motivations behind this - but a significantly massive portion of the UE4 user base is shipping games to Steam, and while savvy programmers/developers like myself are capable of implementing this stuff - we are either unable to share our efforts because of time or contractual obligations, or in the rare occurence somebody creates a pull request it goes largely ignored until it's out-of-date.
I've found myself spending a couple of weeks implementing user stats and entitlements because the engines interfaces for this are non-existent - but I am unable to share my implementations due to contractual obligations. We've also made several drastic improvements to the Steam implementation that we are also unable to share.
I know Epic are busy - but my main purpose for this thread is to draw attention to how light-on-implementation some of the OSS interfaces are in Unreal in the hope it ends up on somebodies radar. If the OSS-system is going to exist at all, it should really be complete. UE4 has been out over five years now and we're still contending with this all the time.
And yes I am aware of UWorks and various other third-party implementations - but none of these are implemented in a platform-agnostic way, which is a deal-breaker for multiplatform games (which is an increasingly common standard nowadays).
I don't mean to rant - but the engine has been public for >5 years and I honestly think to only addition to the OSS in that time has been Steam Authentication - and even that took 20 releases to get to. The engine doesn't even update to the latest Steam SDK with each release. I'd really like to get this changed, either through Epic or via the community on their behalf.
Comment