UE4 Roadmap

[ZenDavis]

You are not a paying customer until you are (that is you make a product that sells and generates income for Epic) and soon you will be in the 1% group of non-VR gamers. You can argue as much as you like, but VR is the future and the path to the future starts today.

Although I do want to see solid core, tools and AI since all that is necessary for both VR and non-VR.

Stop your **** measuring contest. Plenty of people think VR isn't the future. You're going have to make peace with that. Repeating "VR is the future" doesn't make it true. The top games on Steam ATM have nothing to do with VR. The top selling Unreal games have nothing to do with VR either. The top selling Console games have nothing to do with VR. I'm sorry.

Optical Discs were the future. Doesn't everyone should drop everything they're doing and start making games for the SEGA-CD.

[motorsep]

Plenty of people think VR isn't the future. You're going have to make peace with that.

They only think that because: A. they never tried it (I don't know anyone who tried VR and didn't think it's the future that is already here); B. they are indie devs who are too comfortable where they are and not willing to learn entirely new paradigm in the game design and development.

[ZenDavis]

They only think that because: A. they never tried it (I don't know anyone who tried VR and didn't think it's the future that is already here); B. they are indie devs who are too comfortable where they are and not willing to learn entirely new paradigm in the game design and development.

Doesn't matter if they did it or not. Go make another gimmick console with Nintendo and let the rest of design games for core gamers.

[Maximum-Dev]

They only think that because: A. they never tried it (I don't know anyone who tried VR and didn't think it's the future that is already here); B. they are indie devs who are too comfortable where they are and not willing to learn entirely new paradigm in the game design and development.

That still means there's plenty of people who think VR isn't the future and don't want to invest in it. Regardless of the reason behind it.

[emeraldcoast]

You are not a paying customer until you are (that is you make a product that sells and generates income for Epic) and soon you will be in the 1% group of non-VR gamers. You can argue as much as you like, but VR is the future and the path to the future starts today.

Although I do want to see solid core, tools and AI since all that is necessary for both VR and non-VR.

I am selling successfully on the marketplace,just not as "emeraldcoast",so whats the point?
Before VR can take over it has to be in a resonable prize range for the normal customer.
Which means it has to run on a mid range graphics card on high or even ultra settings in 90 frames per sec. at 4k or probably even way higher resolution(so that you cant see the individual pixel anymore), on a wireless headset which weights way less than 300 gram (maybe i would not insist on the wireless part of it if all the other conditions where fullfilled) . How will you manage to achive that with the existing accumulator/battery,gpu,bandwith and display tech?

I have nothing against switching to VR in General, but not to the existing VR system of oculus rift,because thats just a very lackluster experience, at least for my taste. But if there would be some decent tech out there i would be the first to switch!

But i would never buy or use a facebook product anyways(I rather would play "duke nukem forever" or "aliens:colonial marines" for an entire year,every day for 12 hours nonstop,than useing a facebook product only once), so it had to be htc vive 3.0 or some other player.

[UnrealEnterprise]

<Give Dev-Grants to 'Community-Projects' so Epic can focus on the Core Engine>

Hey all, we've made some updates to the Unreal Engine roadmap. Read all about what is new here!

[MENTION=14973]Chance Ivey[/MENTION]:

#1. The new Roadmap may mean the end of support for wishlist items like Large-Worlds...
(Doubles+Unity3D-Camera-Blending) or Runtime-Terrain or Spherical-Terrain / Navmeshes etc.

So why not give 'Dev-Grants' to 'Community-Projects' that offer these kinds of 'Wishlist-Items'?


#2. Cheers for Mesh-Editing / Geometry-Tools-2.0! This was long coming but its really appreciated!


#3. Cheers too for not mugging users / monetizing privacy like how UA mugs Overbooked-Passengers:

You increasingly find a number of the larger tech companies have business models that are directly at odds with their customers.
Instead of selling them software that they value, they're giving them software and extracting value through....
...intrusions into their privacy or advertising that just detracts from their product's user experience......

[Deathrey]

I have somewhat double feelings about trello change. As a first impression, removal of feature requests and voting seems like silencing the rebellion
But what is the point of displaying requested items, if they are not getting implemented anyway? I have no doubt that relevant personnel is fully aware of what are the most frequently requested features without them being on trello or elsewhere. Besides, the financial factor is still there and careful judgement on where to invest work efforts can't rely on community interests. I'd wish to believe it being so, but from the first glance, best selling UE4 game titles are suffering from the same issues, that are discussed on the forums.

On the other hand, the change to display only stuff, that is definitely going to be implemented, is gold. Proper and reliable prognosis for the immediate future features to be implemented turns out to be very valuable. Yet again, it does not have to a trello board then. Sticky forum post would be more than enough.

You can argue as much as you like, but VR is the future and the path to the future starts today.

Both real-time ray tracing and interstellar travel are the future. Can't argue with that either. Question is how long will it take to reach it.
VR in entertainment will remain a niche product for at least a decade. For now, high end VR games remind me of shutter glasses stereo vision back in its days of glory VR might just die out eventually. Who knows
There is no reason focusing mostly on VR-related features now. It is way to early.

[motorsep]

I am selling successfully on the marketplace,just not as "emeraldcoast",so whats the point?

Exactly, what's the point of bringing Marketplace to VR conversation? o.O

But i would never buy or use a facebook product anyways

That really shows your level of maturity.

[motorsep]

That still means there's plenty of people who think VR isn't the future and don't want to invest in it. Regardless of the reason behind it.

That's what they said about any new tech that we now use routinely.

[ZenDavis]

That's what they said about any new tech that we now use routinely.

Like the Wii mote and the Kinnect and 3d Tvs.

[motorsep]

Like the Wii mote and the Kinnect and 3d Tvs.

Except VR is more like smartphones.

[Ivey]

Hey all, I'm glad to see that you're all extremely passionate about where we're taking Unreal Engine and have concerns about things like visibility into our plans. I wanted to directly address a number of your concerns and hopefully shed some more light as to why we've made a few of these decisions, what this means for the "old stuff" on the other Trello, and, in general, how we build Unreal Engine.

The new roadmap tells us less about what's going on than the last one. Great job...

Seems a little sparse at the moment. It was helpful to know that Niagara and AI physical movement were in the pipeline because I've been holding off implementing custom solutions to some of my problems.

I really dislike this new roadmap, the old one was much more helpful.

There are exactly 3 things listed now there, instead of like 200 things before? And out of those 2 things, the audio engine and PCSS shadows is both already in the master branch, so it's not even something new by now for someone who uses master.

Please move back to the old roadmap design. It's much nicer to know exactly what things you consider working on, even if out of the 200 things only 50 will really be worked on. Also, the fact that there are no categories now makes it a lot worse. You really should not group rendering stuff, AI stuff, audio stuff and whatever all in one "Targeted: 4.X" group.

Really, please consider moving back to the old roadmap where we can actually see what you have planned for whole 2017, even if some of the things might move to 2018 or 2019. That's how software development usually works, so not really an issue. Just not showing it at all is really, really bad.

How to make the roadmap 100 times more useful in 3 easy steps:
1) remove the new roadmap.
2) restore the old roadmap.
3) update the old roadmap.

Since I mentioned volumetric fog I think its a good example of the past issues with the roadmap. It got a very large amount of votes. Sat around showing backlogged for ages with few clues as to whether it was being developed. Then showed up as being under development last summer, causing me to get excited. Then it got backlogged again and little was heard about it until it showed up in github commit in the month or so before 4.16 preview was done.

The old roadmap had a lot of great things about it, but over time we began to see (and get feedback about) how it was failing our developer community by not providing any meaningful timeline (because it proved very difficult for us to predict) in which a feature would land. There are so many things we want to do with Unreal Engine, and many items that we have to table for a while for one reason or another. We've run into a few of situations where developers have put off implementing a specific feature for their game because we had it listed on our roadmap. Not having any sort of timeline for delivery caused confusion and frustration as it's difficult to plan on information that can change. These are the situations that we're trying to avoid to help put developers on a path towards success. The volumetric fog mention above is a great example of this - we knew we wanted to do it, but we're just now getting to the point to where it can make its way into the engine. The information on the cards now are completely representative of what is confirmed to be on the way with an actual release number tied to it.

Ah, really pretty and informative as far as 4.16 release, but really obscure when it comes to the future of the engine

I still wish we had list of back logged features, short terms features (2-3 months, which are worked on), and vote reset every 2-3 weeks. This would allow to gather which items trending in community and better prioritize what community wants.

On new road map there is no status on things like Niagara, which I bet quite a few people eagerly waiting for.

So what happened to everything that was on the old roadmap and isn't on the new one? The 4.17 section is quite short?

4.16 is still a few weeks away, and the details for the full release are still coming in. What you're seeing now in the 4.16 list is representative of what we hope to have for each release as we move forward. Currently, the 4.17 section is pretty short, but that's mostly due to the fact that we're still working on 4.16 (Preview 1 just dropped earlier this week) and the items listed in that category landed in that build. You'll most certainly see the 4.17 list grow and soon! We expect new items to show up as we have our regular development team check-ins. If you take a look back at the last year or so, we're roughly putting out a version of UE4 every three months. Since 4.16 is still a few weeks out, the items slated for 4.17 are all within that 2-3 months time frame

Information on whats going on is more important than big pretty looking pictures.

I think that the limited amount of stuff on there at the moment is just because it launched today. I can't imagine this is what the entire roadmap is supposed to look like. I'm sure that it'll be filled in the days to come. Well at least that is my hope.

#1. The new Roadmap may mean the end of support for wishlist items like Large-Worlds...
(Doubles+Unity3D-Camera-Blending) or Runtime-Terrain or Spherical-Terrain / Navmeshes etc.

We're not changing our plans or what we would like to work on or deliver in some future release, we've just moved to a format that provides a more accurate view into what is going to be in your hands in a few months. This doesn't mean the end of wish-list items at all.

How does ignoring community's wishlist, ignoring backlogged items, removing community votes, keeping things behind the scenes, aid the development of our projects?

How is Epic today being any transparent and making things more accessible to the community?

There is enough feedback on the matter already so I hope Epic really meant it when they mention they love feedback.

Lets not play any games. Are we going to have ANY say in requesting features or not? If not just delete this specific forum. Take your ball and go home.

Features that the community wants are of great importance to us, and we welcome any feature requests to be posted up one level on our Feedback for Epic forum where many of the developers and dev leads spend time (and the Unreal Engine Community team ). This is by far the best place for you to request features, raise concerns and take part in helping shape Unreal Engine 4.

A quick aside about VR development: There's a lot of discussion here on VR features and their overall benefit to technology, and we're certainly all in on VR. However, the technology we build for VR rarely comes at the cost of other engine features and often adds benefit across the board as mentioned by a few here. We're continually building a vast number of non-VR specific features that benefit game and application developers of all kinds, not just for VR

I hope that provides a little better picture into the "why" behind some of the changes, and we hear your feedback loud and clear in your comments here, so thanks again for lettings us know what you think. I hope to have addressed some of your concerns and look forward to hearing back from you.

Lastly, let's try and keep the harassment of each other to a minimum... We're all developers here trying to make great things with the toolkit and many of us are passionate about different pieces of technology, features and markets, but this thread should remain focused on the roadmap itself. Thanks!

[Themanwithideas]

Hey all, we've made some updates to the Unreal Engine roadmap. Read all about what is new here!

I like the 4.16 release notes but where's the roadmap?

[BlackFangTech]

There are three things on the roadmap and none are the one that should actually be there. "Fix the bugs"

Every release since around 4.12 the engine has gotten wore and worse in terms of stability. "Blueprint Weirdness Syndrome" now strikes in nearly every project. Blueprint structs are essentially time-bombs. Steam voice chat was busted in 4.15. The nonsensical "***** has to have 'Simulate Physics' enabled if you'd like to AddImpulse" message still spams the logs. I still can't spawn objects in a c++ constructor like I could in older versions. In recent months Answer Hub staff have gotten less willing to try to repro anything or even acknowledge a problem. It takes two months of people complaining to get a bug report entered.

To be honest, communication with Epic staff was great during the first couple of years after UE4 released, but now meaningful responses almost never occur. Nearly every staff post starts with some kind of platitude and glosses over the real issues.

I feel I should mention I nearly exclusively develop for VR now. At all 3 companies I do long-term work for, I am a VR dev. PLEASE STOP SHOVING VR GIMMICKS INTO THE ENGINE. VR Editor will never not be a gimmick. I don't want to stand up and strap on the headset while I am working. Your engine is becoming nearly unusable due to major bugs that aren't being fixed while you completely over-focus on VR.

If you want to put something more specific on the roadmap, then "Placeholder-class catastrophe" Error This blueprint (self) is not a PLACEHOLDER-CLASS https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...ment-4112.html and "All my child blueprints reset" https://forums.unrealengine.com/show...ariables-Reset are good places to start.

[teak421]

Thanks Chance for the update...

teak