Open Letter To Epic

2014-04-30

My Dear Beloved Epic,

when I found out that you released the Unreal Engine 4 to the public at such friendly terms I jumped on it. I have always regarded the Unreal Engine as being one of the best, in many cases even the best game engine available. When I first started the engine I was really impressed. The ease of use is astounding; the ease at which assets can be integrated and even created in the engine is unrivalled. The though and engineering put into this engine is remarkable.

But working basically every day for the last three weeks I have come to the conclusion, the engine, although very promising, is still severely lacking in polish. The engine and editor is far from broken, but a few dints in the perfectly wrong places make working with the Unreal Engine 4 frustrating and unpleasant.

To begin with the documentation is severely limited. I understand that you focused on getting the engine ready for release was the top priority. In addition I can see that the body documentation is strongly growing and I am confident that is a years time, you and third parties will have created the body documentation that is needed to build a game without foraging through menus and node lists. But for the time being, to a certain degree the saying applies: "If a feature is not documented, it does not exist".

I really admire the fidelity of the static lighting, with a few tweaks the scene is lit in the most realistic lighting conditions. Unfortunately this only is true for static lighting, dynamic lighting has no indirect lighting, not even approximated first level reflection. This makes dynamic time of day basically a non starter. Either you have dynamic time of day or the scene look nice.

One of the first project I looked at was the FPS demo. This demo is gorgeous and really shows off the potential of the engine. This demo ran around 20-30 FPS on my machine. I will admit that my machine although strong, is not newest biggest money can buy. Also I did not expect other of you, this map must look awesome for at least the next half decade. The problem is that when this map is loaded into the editor the editor slows to a crawl of 1-2 FPS and is rendered almost totally unresponsive. I understand that the editor has more rendering complexity with all the menus, but this drop in performance is unacceptable. Getting the rendering setting to a usable level of medium is borderline impossible, because of the level of unresponsiveness. The editor should detect severe adverse performance conditions and automatically scale back fidelity in the sake of usability.

Although I have not yet found the true cause of this issue, even moderately complex levels of around 100 boxes introduce a small stutter when static geometry is moved, added or removed. It appears to be the preview light maps being updated. This stutter, where the editor freezes up for the duration of something like 1-2 seconds makes building levels a real pain.

With the above in mind, the entire situation is aggravated with the fact that the editor appears to leak memory. The longer it runs the more memory it needs. Although I understand that the editor needs large amounts of memory start with, for example to keep previews of assets in memory, the growing memory consumptions forces my system to page out memory, something that is a very rare occasion. This make working with the engine and other tools after around one hour impossible. The task switch then takes around ten seconds to complete. This is a problem that will not be solved with putting more memory in my system, since it will just delay this adverse condition. Getting back into a usable state requires either a reboot of the machine or patience and I do not want to have my coffee breaks dictated by a game editor.

Finally using fonts in your engine is basically impossible. You import a true type font and one out of three times when playing the game from the editor it crashes. You already have a large number of crash dumps and I hope that you will soon fix this issue. If I can be of any help, like build the engine from sources and then retry, let me know.

Playing around with your engine was fun, but for the time being I will wait for a more mature version of your engine.

Best Regards,

Sean "rioki" Farrell