What is going on with UEFN?

[midnight summit]

Every single update feels like more of a set back than progress. It just feels like so much of the development process is "slog" at the moment and its only getting worse each update. I'm going to go through each step of the process and go over the issues and suggest potential solutions.

Starting off, we load up a map just to have to wait over 3 mins sometimes just for everything to render and load.

Now I go to open vscode with the verse button and then have to deal with issues where the verse code server just won't start sometimes (why on earth is UEFN required to be open for this to work...)

Finally, I get to writing some code, create a new verse device, place it down and then go to test it. Now I have to wait another 5 mins to get into a game and to push changes.

Once in the game, I can test my code and realise I forgot to link a mutator zone to the verse device. So I add that and now I have to push changes again.

Another 5 mins later, I can retest the map.

After doing all that, day after day for weeks, my map is finally done and I'm now ready to publish.

I go to the creator portal, and have to fill in a questionnaire that asks the most ridiculous questions sometimes. I fill that in and submit.

Sadly it got rejected and I didn't get told any details as to why. I think, why not try again with the exact same everything and oh it passed this time!

But oh, there is an issue that only appeared in the live, published game that didn't happen when testing in the editor. No worries, I fix that and go to publish the update where I only changed code in the my game. And it gets rejected with the exact same everything as before. This time however, even after a second try it doesn't fix itself. But wait, if I completely re-upload the thumbnail it works! Yay my update is finally pushed.

This is a real story that happened to me the last time I tried to create a complete map.

Part 1/3

If we add up the amount of time wasted here, its over a day of wasted time. That is absurd when my development period was a few weeks. I said I would give solutions to these issues, instead of just stating negatives so I'll do that here.

To start, lets allow us to get verse syntax highlighting without having to have the UEFN project that the verse code belongs to open. This would save so much time in development and allow us to write code on the go and on lower powered devices.

Then pushing changes, somehow this has gotten progressively worse and its now quicker to create a private code and test in there which should technically not be the case afaik. Maybe there is an issue here that needs to be looked at?

Main issue is with the creator portal, why is IARC so inconsistent? This definitely needs to be internally reviewed and feels like such a rushed implementation. How is fortnite's loading screen allowed to have guns and explosions but ours aren't? Every player sees that when they launch the game. Communication is key here, but it seems we get nothing. We get blog posts that are pages long but manages to actually tell us nothing new. This seems to be a trend across all Fortnite departments and its sad to see. What stops you guys from just being a bit more open and honest with us. I thought you were all for openness?

Moderation got a bit better but has gone back to being inconsistent and gives no information again. Feels like its just gotten lazy. Maybe an update on this would be amazing.

Also, might be a good idea to just stop with the blogposts, they genuinely manage to say so many words without actually saying anything. I am sure so many of us would rather just a read-only discord channel where you post updates straight there without any of the blogpost jargon that makes them so hard to read and actually pull information from.

Part 2/3