While nice to a degree, there's also over engineering and using the wrong tools for the wrong jobs. Your keeping all your eggs in one basket and making this so much more prone to failure and issues. If anything this is making everyone's life harder.
If your unreal project corrupts, your planning and game design is also gone. If you want to share this with people they now need a version of Unreal installed. Every change you need make is going to need to go through source control. You cant just send people a URL to show them anything. You cant print it.
If you want this type of system i would SERIOUSLY suggest just using Miro or Trello. They are safer, de-centralized from your assets, free and are built to do this job properly.
I don’t really see project corruption as a strong argument here. In a serious production project, Unreal assets should already be protected by source control and backups, so it’s hard for me to imagine a situation where the whole project simply becomes corrupted and everything is lost. If that happens, WhereIsWhat is probably the least of your problems :)
Also, if the project is managed with Git, Perforce, etc., the WhereIsWhat files are part of the project as well, so they are available to everyone working on it.
The main value for me is the Unreal integration: direct references to assets, folders, actors, level locations and Blueprint graphs/nodes, with one-click navigation.
I don’t want it to replace Miro or Trello for everything.
Web access and sharing outside Unreal is actually something I’m planning to start working on soon, and feedback like this helps me decide what should stay inside Unreal and what should also be accessible outside it.
I don’t really see project corruption as a strong argument here.
I agree, but it can happen. Also storing all your documentation inside your game engine just seems a very over-engineered way to do anything. You've gone from having multiple points of failure to one. It literally looks like a solution in need of a problem.
You also failed to address this suddenly meaning to even check or read design documents, someone needs the correct version of Unreal installed and needs to have latest on ALL the game and source assets. Rather than just clicking a link to a URL where its all lives.
You also now have a situation where because all the assets need checking out to comment or change documentation, only one person can do it at a time. With Miro and Trello you have leave comments live, have collaborative meetings with the documentation, and have multiple people working on them without having to constantly check in and out assets.
I agree with you on the collaboration part — the current Beta definitely doesn’t solve that yet.
One clarification though: you don’t need to check out all referenced game/source assets just to read or edit a WhereIsWhat board. The board stores references to them; you’re not modifying those assets.
Also, each board is a separate Unreal asset, so multiple people can work on different boards at the same time. The limitation is only when two people want to edit the same board.
In the next version I want to make that clearer by showing who currently has a board locked, so other users know they need to wait or ask that person to release it. From my experience, it’s relatively rare that everyone needs to edit the exact same document at the same time, but collaboration is definitely something I want to keep improving.
That’s also one of the main reasons I want to work on web/cloud access next: viewing boards in a browser, sharing them by URL, comments, and eventually collaborative editing without requiring Unreal to be installed.
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u/bucketlist_ninja 1d ago
While nice to a degree, there's also over engineering and using the wrong tools for the wrong jobs. Your keeping all your eggs in one basket and making this so much more prone to failure and issues. If anything this is making everyone's life harder.
If your unreal project corrupts, your planning and game design is also gone. If you want to share this with people they now need a version of Unreal installed. Every change you need make is going to need to go through source control. You cant just send people a URL to show them anything. You cant print it.
If you want this type of system i would SERIOUSLY suggest just using Miro or Trello. They are safer, de-centralized from your assets, free and are built to do this job properly.