Sisyphus, 1538 by Titian
Sisyphus, the king of Corinth was cursed by Pluto, the god of the underworld to push a boulder up a mountain for an eternity, only to have it roll down the other side, forcing him to commit the the task again. This is what it’s like to work in Unreal Engine 5 at the present.
Never feel that you’ve won when you’ve lost. I created a 1 to 1 ratio of Saba Island (in relation to the size of the player in the game) and I was ready to begin the work of populating it with trees and roads, but I created it on a test drive. When I moved the configuration to the production drive, all Hell floated away. Yeah, that’s right, I could not reproduce anything…so I went to work on the initial map that I had constructed, and guess what? It was not a 1 to 1 reproduction of Saba Island, but rather I have no clue what the construction size is. There is just too much math to do a simple task.
The problem, as I see it, is that the developers of such an amazing piece of software, which is Unreal Engine 5, are always innovating, and doing deep think changes instead of trying to drag old ideologies, or ways of doing things into version spanning updates. Bravo for them, but developers still think like developers. What I mean by this is that they still believe the people who are flocking to Unreal Engine 5 are developers. This is the mistake of Unity whereas to use that game engine well you had to have developer training and understanding of code.
Code and looking at game development as a coder would is the current problem. An artist, a writer, a sound engineer, a visionary, a CEO, a producer, a director, a painter, or lets just class all of these people as ‘creatives’ would not approach things from the perspective of a developer to put it simply. It may take ‘Developer Think’ to construct an island, but an artist is not going to do this. ‘Human Think’ is more general. Take my situation: I downloaded a Height-map, or a topographical photograph, many time taken by satellite. Using a height-map to do the lion’s share of the work a user of Unreal Engine 5 should just have to tell the game engine that this file (height-map) should be used, and the island if 21 kilometers square. And then the hardest part: press the CREATE button.
But instead, you have to understand component sections, and how many subsections are in your component subsection, which affects performance. You have to figure out the Quads in a Landscape Component by giving them a value of a power of two minus 1. Then you have to calculate the height-map dimensions, but some dimensions are valid and some are not, so you have to use this formula (A*Quads + 1, B*Quads + 1). Now A and B are the number of landscape components in each direction, and blah, blah, blah, cross your eyes and shake your head. This kind of stuff goes on and on before you can click the CREATE button. You have to calculate the Z height-map scale which is another formula and then use a recommended landscape size using a list of acceptable prime numbers that will make you tired.
Understand something, computers make things easier because they do the work in the background. All the ‘Developer Think’ that I explained above should be boiled down to resolution issues three choices: High, Medium, Low. Z height: ‘Z’ is the tallest mountain in kilometers, which is 50 kilometers, simple numbers. Then click CREATE. End of story, with all this other bull-sh*t happening in the background, which when done correctly makes software appear like magic and highly praised. If you had to calculate the page size of an 8 1/2 x 11 inch page, using pixel width and depth per inch to use Word to type a letter, you make the word processor ridiculously useless. The more the calculations a human has to do instead of a CPU and GPU, whose only reason for existence is to crunch numbers, the more useless you make your software.
This has to be addressed in Unreal Engine 5 because I’ve read through a lot of documentation that is literally out of date because of the fast pace of innovation of the software, comments in forums and discussion groups of people wandering around in the dark searching for answers to use problems, and YouTube videos which is quite possibly the dumbest way to learn something as quickly evolving and ‘Developer Think’ driven as Unreal Engine 5 is. It’s really a lack of understanding evinced by Epic Games, the creator of Unreal Engine if they actually believe people can learn in this fashion. Which is akin to being taught by the other kids in the classroom. You spend hours with these people ‘learning’ only to find that whatever they taught you DOES NOT WORK.
What I’m not doing is saying that these YouTube Creators, or learning via YouTube are/is stupid and doomed to failure, I’m saying that the level of innovation and changes are so fast that even Epic Games can’t keep their documentation up to date with the latest changes.
Further, when it comes to YouTube Creators, it makes sense, even if it doesn’t to the developers of Unreal Engine. Another type of YouTube creator searches for issues that haven’t been addressed or made easier by Epic. Then they post a solution by crafty editing. They’ll tell you to do ‘this’ and ‘that’ and VOILA! see how it works? It doesn’t. But you’ve clicked on their video and they get a bump in their viewership, which means money for them, and Epic thinks: “problem solved", people are learning how to use our software, which is just solving problems via crack smoking.
Everyone wins, the users, and game creators lose.
So my beloved Saba Island can’t move to production and I’m finding out that others in the Unreal Engine Learning portal are suffering the same problem. Many are complaining of bugs, and useless operation, but one should expect this from the rapid level of innovations and upgrades near monthly to the software. But one thing is for certain, I know Epic will solve these errors in time. It is not an unnatural curve in software creation, they just need time. Until then I’ll just move on to other issues with creating this game and when the solution arises it’ll simply be a matter of plugging it in and calling it a day.
But the real question is: will Epic Game’s step up and teach its users how to use its software, or will they make their software less ‘developer friendly’, and more ‘people friendly’? This is the real problem behind their innovation, making Unreal Engine a developer’s dream and a creator’s nightmare.
I will make this game, and you, if you decide to play it, you will struggle, because I want you in my horror. Your Terror is Expected.