[EDITOR] Please stop racing through the versions! (More 4.12 Updates)

[Burnz]

Hi guys,
i'm in general very happy with the engine but i noticed you are lately rushing through the versions. Since 4.10 we didn't have a version for our game that we can use also for shipping, there is always something broken. In 4.11 it was playing movies in the standalone, in 4.12.0-4 it was several blueprint bugs causing the engine to crash, in 4.12.5 it's Steam Voice cutting out. I think it's great to keep adding content but when i see that there hasn't been a single issue solved for 4.12 in the last 29 days i know already 4.13 will cause headaches when it's time to update - i already saw a few bug reports being closed which i should report again for 4.13 if they still occur. It's been more or less 3 months since we had a relative stable engine (I consider 4.10 stable - although it had some issues it ran stable for us).

At least consider releasing another update for 4.12 - thank you.

[SE_JonF]

+ 1 from me on this. I think the team should really take their time and ensure a polished release.

[darthviper107]

It seems to me that they are taking quite a bit of time, each release seems to take longer than the last one. At some point you stop updating and just put fixes into the next version release

[Hevedy]

The speed with what the versions are released don't are related at all with the final quality, Epic don't use the master branch from public at all, and they have sub branches and other master branch, so the version cross over different union process and the content released today probably has been made 4 months ago.

[jojo8026]

LMAO the gaming industry doesn't stay still, Technology doesn't just stop advancing, Epic has to be able to keep pace with the industry

[Burnz]

LMAO the gaming industry doesn't stay still, Technology doesn't just stop advancing, Epic has to be able to keep pace with the industry

That's not an excuse for leaving major bugs unaddressed in the current version. It's been 30 days without a single fix in 4.12 and it will take at least another 4-6 weeks until 4.13.0 gets released, and then another 4 weeks until you see issues we previously reported for 4.12 being addressed in 4.13 - they are closing the tickets for 4.12 with the reason that 4.13 is coming and we should reopen tickets in case the bug persists in 4.13

Guess you never made a game and released it yourself, otherwise you would understand. We are releasing in early september and at this point it looks like we will have to downgrade back to 4.10 to get a stable version that can play videos, doesn't crash in the standalone and works properly with Steam.

[CriErr]

LMAO the gaming industry doesn't stay still, Technology doesn't just stop advancing, Epic has to be able to keep pace with the industry

I cant remember any technology advances worth considering in last 3 engine versions (vr thing is a clunky toy targeted on small part of developers), all of them just nice things to have, but those which you can live without. So i do agree with the @OP about one strong and stable build.

[Burnz]

I cant remember any technology advances worth considering in last 3 engine versions (vr thing is a clunky toy targeted on small part of developers), all of them just nice things to have, but those which you can live without. So i do agree with the @OP about one strong and stable build.

SteamVoice cutting out is critical for us, we are releasing on Steam and our game is a coop game. We even developed a spatialized voice plugin for the system. At this point voice cuts out - on the default installation without any plugins. I have several studios on the answerhub jumping in and telling them that they struggle with the same issue. Yet you'll see 4 weeks on 4.12 without any fixes on Github and until 4.13 is actually out you won't see any fixes coming up for 4.13 either - they asked us to file the issue again for 4.13, thus loosing 8-12 weeks on solving the issues.

At least provide us a way so we can implement fixes on 4.13 into 4.12 - you currently cannot properly search for commits or keep track of their bugfixes. Look at https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...tting-out.html - there are at least 3 studios having this issue. And both UE-31605 and UE-34081 cannot be found anywhere. For UE-31605 they say first :

"Thanks for your report. UE-31605 is the Jira report for this issue. It's currently on our to do list and is listed as a priority 2, major bug."
then later
"UE-31605 has been closed out as cannot reproduce"

We even provided 2 sample projects - for 4.11 where it's working and 4.12 where it is not working. But forget about that - if you solve issues in 4.13 while it is still 4-8 weeks away from release at least have the courtesy to let us know which commit we can grab on Github to put it into 4.12 ourself. That's all i am asking.

[CriErr]

Cant you try to fix the problem by yourself? I imagine, if your studio is capable of creating plugins for voice chat, you should be capable to find the changes to core of currently broken but previously working functionality.

[Tim Hobson]

SteamVoice cutting out is critical for us, we are releasing on Steam and our game is a coop game. We even developed a spatialized voice plugin for the system. At this point voice cuts out - on the default installation without any plugins. I have several studios on the answerhub jumping in and telling them that they struggle with the same issue. Yet you'll see 4 weeks on 4.12 without any fixes on Github and until 4.13 is actually out you won't see any fixes coming up for 4.13 either - they asked us to file the issue again for 4.13, thus loosing 8-12 weeks on solving the issues.

At least provide us a way so we can implement fixes on 4.13 into 4.12 - you currently cannot properly search for commits or keep track of their bugfixes. Look at https://answers.unrealengine.com/que...tting-out.html - there are at least 3 studios having this issue. And both UE-31605 and UE-34081 cannot be found anywhere. For UE-31605 they say first :

"Thanks for your report. UE-31605 is the Jira report for this issue. It's currently on our to do list and is listed as a priority 2, major bug."
then later
"UE-31605 has been closed out as cannot reproduce"

We even provided 2 sample projects - for 4.11 where it's working and 4.12 where it is not working. But forget about that - if you solve issues in 4.13 while it is still 4-8 weeks away from release at least have the courtesy to let us know which commit we can grab on Github to put it into 4.12 ourself. That's all i am asking.

The comments on UE-31605 indicate that the issue here is not the same as the one for UE-34081 which was created by the engineer to track the specific issue you're talking about. I went ahead and made public the UE-34081, which is the one marked as To Do.

When fixes are submitted and merged to GitHub the committed fix should have a link on the right side of the page that links directly to the commit on GitHub for Release and Main. You can then grab these and merge these into your previous versions if you'd like.

[Burnz]

Cant you try to fix the problem by yourself? I imagine, if your studio is capable of creating plugins for voice chat, you should be capable to find the changes to core of currently broken but previously working functionality.

We've been trying that. The UE4 source isn't small so it's very time-consuming to compare code you didn't write and debug the issue at the same time. We were able to stop the AudioComponent from stalling so VoiceChat continues to operate BUT it seems voice packets are still disappearing sometimes after receiving them. This is not a proper fix.

But again, this thread isn't just about this issue. The released UE4 Version (4.12.5) should be maintained and receive bugfixes until the new version (4.13.X) is ready - at least until major issues are solved.

[SouldomainTM]

+1

I do agree that UE4 needs a lot more bug fixing. Coming from Unity, I still have to learn UE4. Although now I do know where some bugs are hiding, and I know how to avoid them. The buggy experience with UE4 still makes a bit harder to learn, because I can't tell at times weather I did something wrong, or is UE4 misbehaving again.

[lunyBunny]

I think is quite interesting always being thinking in innovations (adding new features, new technologies and approaches, taking into account feedback from developers), working always side by side with bugfixes over the logic of pre-existing intricacies in previous versions.

I have no criticism related to the current method adopted by Epic to label the Unreal Engine 4 framework. But taking advantage of the topic, I think, (It is only an idea)

Could change the main Unreal version whenever some thing significant (not existing in previous versions) is added. And thinking over bugfixes as something part-added as a new decimal value over the latest version. Then we would have a bugfix, per example, as something v4.13.1. And a completely new version like v4.14 showing new technologies, new approaches/simplifications (inexistent in old v4.13.1 version).


luny