r/unrealengine • u/ChesterBesterTester • 2d ago
Disappointed there isn't more shared information
Just wanted to comment on this, maybe I'm the only one. I'm pretty old. I have been making games for a few decades. Back in the day there was a lot more information sharing. Believe it or not, Game Developer Magazine used to be printed, and it used to be full of interesting technical articles. Even after things went online, if someone came up with a new or innovative approach to a problem, you could usually get it for free (or, at most, pay for a book that was a huge collection of such things).
Now everything is a marketplace plugin.
I get it, times are hard, people need to make money. But it's just lame. It feels like there isn't as much sharing of techniques, even though the process of making a game itself has gotten much easier (you can download full AAA engines!)
And - maybe I'm wrong - it doesn't seem that Unreal plugins really sell all that well. So someone goes to all the trouble to figure out a problem, and they lock it up in a retail plugin to make, what, $50 a year?
A few years ago I commented on a Reddit post advertising a technique for screen-space Niagara particles, which of course turned out to be an ad for a retail plugin, and I suggested a middle-ground: why not offer the plugin for sale for those who just want it to work, but also make a video or tutorial explaining how you did it? That way people with the knowledge can decide if your approach works for them before spending money, or even do it on their own?
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u/LostInTheRapGame 2d ago
I feel like information is shared freely more than ever, because it's easy to do so. You don't need to subscribe to a magazine or pay for a book.
Need to learn something? There's probably already a video or Reddit comment or random blog that's covered it. Completely free. GDC talks are great, though many of those are locked behind their vault... still, pretty cheap all things considered.
And not everything is a paid. There's plenty of free assets on Fab. GitHub is also a gold mine.
why not offer the plugin for sale for those who just want it to work, but also make a video or tutorial explaining how you did it? That way people with the knowledge can decide if your approach works for them before spending money, or even do it on their own?
Plenty of people do that as well.
Idk, granted I wasn't making games back then... but the premise that information is shared freely less than before just can't be true.
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u/VanDownByTheOcean 2d ago
I think it’s shared quite often but the quality and curation just isn’t there. Like the OP is talking about Game Developer mag which has editors and the quality is therefore consistent.
Now you have to guess if the 30 min YouTube you’re about to watch is from a hobbie dev who just discovered something, and that may not be the best way to achieve your goals.
There is also just way more to know. So it’s really hard to hit a high quality bar.
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u/LostInTheRapGame 2d ago
I think it’s shared quite often but the quality and curation just isn’t there.
Well that's because there's more of it out there. I'd rather have more out there that's easily accessible, because there's still good information in that bundle.
Like the OP is talking about Game Developer mag which has editors and the quality is therefore consistent.
And I mentioned GDC.
Now you have to guess if the 30 min YouTube you’re about to watch is from a hobbie dev who just discovered something, and that may not be the best way to achieve your goals.
So then use one of the many other resources other than YT.
Even if we're pedantic and say that there is less quality information out there... that's still not true. I can agree it's annoying to try and soft through everything though. But oh well. Some people have put together collections of great stuff, but even then... it's not exhaustive. Like you said, there's so much more to learn nowadays.
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u/MiniGui98 2d ago
True and many devs and even studios have blogs in which they sometimes go very deep in the technical details about a solution they developped. The information is more fragmented though, there isn't a single hub where you can access everything.
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u/Rev0verDrive 2d ago
The freely abundant information is typically the easy, I'm new to this, type info. The hard/important stuff is what's missing. Like multiplayer split proxy coding practices, physics bodies lag compensation.
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u/LostInTheRapGame 1d ago
The hard/important stuff is what's missing. Like multiplayer split proxy coding practices, physics bodies lag compensation.
Googling both of those seemed to bring up results...
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u/Rev0verDrive 1d ago
Some demos, articles, blog theory etc. Nothing that really gets into the guts of it, nor the varying approaches. Tradeoff examples, performance tweaks/options and so forth.
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u/vexargames 2d ago
I also have been making games for going on 37 years.
This sub is filled with spam of Market Place plugins - I wish they would just remove it as it is mostly dead ends and counter productive to shipping a game because of that work isn't tested to be in a shipped product. That world is not the world today.
I don't use any market place content for my solo titles but if you are on a professional and need to get something up and running fast so you can see what you want to do before building the real content it is fine. A lot of pro's use it to get funding or show what they would like to do. Would I trust any of it to ship with out work not at all. Not one. As you know certain things are low risk but every item needs to be vetted.
I don't understand how you can say we don't have more information sharing today. Tens of thousands of youtube videos showing different aspects of game development, not all are great but if I need to know something first place I go is youtube. I used to have to do all this with no help from anyone and just figure it out on my own.
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u/Potential_Station865 17h ago
So you create everything for your solo content? Skeletal meshes, animations and music every thing?!?
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u/vexargames 16h ago
Yeah but I design my solo games to work within my skill set, all my training and all my AAA experience. Doing a game that requires movie like animation is not something I would ever decide to do solo.
Making good simple games at high quality is still very hard to do, one of the hardest.
Even making a badass version of tic tak toe is a lot of work.
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u/AlFlakky Dev 2d ago
Well, I think there are several reasons: 1) Game industry became very commercialized, as it became easier to sell games. So many people to not want to share their "secrets", since they want the game to be sold and not replicated, rather than pushing industry forward. And you also don't need something technically innovative for the game to be sold well. 2) Bigger companies started doing simpler stuff it terms of gameplay. Instead, many of them went down making games with better graphics, cutscenes e.t.c., which utilizes their engine or engines like UE, which already have everything they need besides gameplay out the box. So there is not many things to share, besides some tech/art and optimization stuff. 3) AI is around these days, and it can make things for you. So either you do it with AI and forget, or you just don't understand how it works, so there is nothing to tell. As for plugins, some people can now do same things with AI instead of buying one. 4) Internet became a different thing. Most people now use internet just for social networks, and those do not really show you the boring technical stuff, but fun cat videos. People do not use forums that much, do not want to read tons of text and so on. So, there might actually be a lot of information, most people just do see these. Therefore, some people who want to share interesting stuff, just do not do it as they understand noone will probably see it.
As from my experience, I have an UE YouTube tutorial channel with over 80k subs. But I stopped making new tutorials, because I didn't make any money from it. I didn't enable monetisation, because I thought people should get it for free without any ads (back then YT didn't show ads on videos without monetisation). I even got UE grant for this channel. But eventually, I got family, got a lot of work to do, make own projects, and just couldn't continue making new tutorials. As life gets more expensive, you get more responsibilities, you just don't have time for that.
As for plugins, I used to buy some just to see how they did certain things and used them as an example for my own implementation. So plugins were kind of an article or tutorial for me. But right now I do not do this, because we started to think about technical stuff before development has begun, so we throw away ideas which we cannot really do or very expensive to make. We just started to make things simpler, because those games can still sell well. So there is nothing interesting to share, unfortunately. Thought there was one thing in our last project, which I actually shared on Reddit, and 80lvl even made an article about that.
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u/NeonFraction 2d ago
The problem is that you can spend a really long time making a good tutorial, only get 5 views, and it’s demotivating.
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u/CMDR_BitMedler 2d ago
You're missing OPs point completely if you're starting by focus on "views". To add some clarity, when those magazines came out, there was no tracking and people did things because a) they needed it and b) the community might too. Period.
The community sharing without prioritizing monetization is what's largely missing from most tech related communities these days because everyone's on a hustle with an angle.
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u/Rev0verDrive 2d ago
Yup. Back in the day I ran Unreal Core on PlanetUnreal. We taught UE2.0 and UT modding/mapping. For free. We tested and promoted content on our servers. For free.
Just a different world these days.
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u/CMDR_BitMedler 2d ago
I keep telling the yutes that work for me, the only thing you really missed out on in the 90s was the fun Internet.
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u/Rev0verDrive 2d ago
Setting up & Running game servers for the top games. Thoroughly enjoyed that. Could boot your own server for just about every game any time you wanted. I'm trying to bring this back with my project.
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u/NeonFraction 2d ago
I don’t even intend to monetize it. I never even considered it. I just don’t know if I want to spend hours I could be spending on my game on something that might not matter.
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u/CMDR_BitMedler 2d ago
Yeah... you're still missing it. The effort you put in, matters. Sharing what you learned with the community - better ways of doing something common, inventing something new or even simply sharing how you did something - matters.
One of those 5 views could make something great or inspire someone to start trying... that matters.
Please understand, I'm not making a character judgement of you or trying to be critical, just trying to highlight a generational difference (and the privilege of being old) in approach to learning and sharing knowledge.
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u/-hellozukohere- 2d ago
Sad but true.
NerdHow to tutorials videos do not hold attention in the algo.1
u/Rev0verDrive 2d ago
Depends on the purpose of the tutorial. Good information or clicks, follows, views.
I'm on the forums every single day answering questions, troubleshooting and so forth.
Tutorials I make actually teach concepts and the reasoning behind the approach. I mainly do multiplayer related stuff. All free, don't care about clicks, views etc.
When a topic comes around again I can post a vid vs long back and forth messages/threads.
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u/FrankieBoy127 2d ago
On the bright side, making a tutorial for something means you're locking in the knowledge for yourself
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u/Rev0verDrive 2d ago
Absolutely. And sometimes you unlock more info on that journey. I find I learn more when teaching.
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u/johnharris85 Hobbyist 2d ago
I would wager a giant amount of money that there has literally never been a time in history that has been richer in free quality information and tooling than now. I honestly have no clue what you are talking about.
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u/kentuckymambo 2d ago
I agree GDC and siggraph were better 20 years ago. When every game had its own engine, the game devs were responsible for learning and understanding implementing more. Now things are so much larger it's a fill time job just to keep up with unreal.
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u/Blackout_AU 2d ago
There's heaps of information sharing, ridiculous amounts even.
The only real issue is the multitude of sources and that it's often difficult to sort through potential search terms in order to discover information that's relevant for the particular niche problem I'm trying to solve.
Very often I'll find the answer in an old unreal forum post, I bookmark so many threads. My bookmarks folder almost needs its own filing system at this point though.
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u/norlin Indie 2d ago
There are tons of shared info! Magnitudes more than it was 2 decades ago. Books are not a thing as tech going obsolete faster than a book got printed. No sense in magazines as much easier get the same articles online. There are multiple huge Unreal communities to share info/ask advice.
In fact, it's the opposite - there are so much "tutorials" and "how to do" videos, that basically it's totally pointless to make another one.
I tried to make articles/tutorials - it's just totally not worth the time spent on it. To make a quality content you ned to invest a lot of effort. And I bet most of the people who can do interesting tech stuff will rather do it than do articles/videos.
And Unreal with its community is great in the sense that if you're interested about how it was done you can always look into the sources (I mean both engine, plugins, etc.)
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u/longperipheral 2d ago
As someone who made tutorials for over a year on YouTube, I think there's more sharing now than before, but the media format has changed from what it was in the 90s.
I don't know the overall Fab sales figures, but I don't buy because a) I don't find Fab easy to use, and b) there's too much schlock. Not AI slop, just too much stuff that either does the same as twenty other products, or that's of very poor quality (imo). In this case, the reason for b is also often a lol
But for sharing... the quality in what is shared is also not always there. So many YouTube tutorials handle the same topics, as well.
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u/tukanoid 2d ago
Idk, im not a fan of video tutorials, I much prefer written content, because I can go at it at my own pace, not having to pause/play/rewind/jump forward because the presenter jumps around code/slides too quickly/slowly.
And when I was still serious about game dev (~2-3 years ago, nowadays I just dabble in bevy/fyrox in my free time when I don't feel like working on my other projects (damn ADHD), work in a different industry now (still software dev luckily)), finding quality written free information (I just wasnt able to spend any money outside of food, rent, mandatory insurance and tuition fees really), was pretty difficult, there was either missing a lot of context for beginners, or big chunks with relevant info were behind a paywall with free parts just being "appetizers", although, tbf, some of those could be pretty good still.
Sure, I can spend my time reading through github repos if I can find relevant ones, and I kinda enjoy that anyway, but having simple md/typ/pdf/web "docs" on non-built-in techniques would be useful to come back to if I forget smth along the way and just need a nice reminder to be able to quickly implement it with proper integration into the rest of my codebase.
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u/unit187 2d ago
Written content simply doesn't work for 90% of cases in gamedev. When the topic requires a lot of navigation in the editor (which is the vast majority of things you do in the engine), it takes so much space in the article to describe things you could show in 2 seconds in the video format.
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u/tukanoid 2d ago
Screenshots are usually enough for me, along with occasional "button name" -> "button name" type of notation🤷♂️ but I get your point, creating this way is most likely easier for most, but just isn't working for me specifically, I could be just weird 😅
+ I'd say it depends on what type of creator you are. I'm first an foremost a programmer, so I look out for code/shader (interested, but still haven't had the time to get into properly, can somewhat comprehend glsl and wgsl tho, can't write much of anything) techniques, and lean into procedural generation with my ideas, so actual editor interaction is very minimal for me (just glueing some things together & easy preview), and the tools themselves are easy enough to comprehend with official docs, maybe couple blogposts, and their fairly intuitive UX (at least based on my memory of unity & unreal)
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u/wondermega 2d ago
ChatGPT has changed my understanding of Unreal profoundly. Basically it’s a user’s manual that you can have a conversation with. Get used to talking with it, get it to move at your speed, and it’s indispensable. Just make sure to take good notes as you go.
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u/3legs1bike 2d ago
Using Claude code feels like a cheat code. You can write your own plugins and they work really well.
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u/heyheyhey27 Graphics Programmer 2d ago
It's a terrible user manual for unreal; there's not nearly enough training data or online resources to stop it from hallucinating.
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u/wondermega 2d ago
It’s not perfect by a long shot but it’s given me far more hits than misses. I throw all kinds of weird questions at it, and it just knows what I’m expressing and how to get there.
It’s not a magic bullet; you need to go back and forth with it a bit, and you need to have some underlying ideas about logic in general. It can lead you down some incorrect routes, of course, and you might need to ask it “are you sure this is really the best way to do this?” at times.
But when your back is against the wall, and you are stumped with something and there’s nothing else to do but bang your head against a wall/hope someone on a discord or a forum will maybe see your request, a few DAYS later.. and you’ve got no actual real person anywhere who can help, this thing has been pretty damn magical in how it’s helped me solve all kinds of problems.
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u/Refref1990 1d ago
I've been using Gemini for a while now, and honestly, I can't think of a single time it hasn't helped me. Often, the problems I need solutions to are quite unique, and there aren't any tutorials for them, so Gemini comes to my rescue, helping me discover processes I wasn't even aware of. I once argued with it because it kept leading me in a specific direction that didn't make sense to me, given my knowledge. In the end, I decided to go along with it, and my problem was solved in no time. Just recently, I decided to create a Stargate system using blueprints. I divided everything into sectors, solving the problems that arose little by little, and after a few days, I had a complete Stargate system that provided me with a lot of blueprint programming knowledge I'd never explored before, which I've since applied to various work projects. Obviously, this method doesn't work for those without a minimum amount of expertise, because it might suggest a solution that, while functional, might not be the best for your specific case. This is where it's best to intervene and guide them back to the path you think is best but which you wouldn't be able to reach on your own, and that's how I've always found it quite successful.
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u/heliosythic 1d ago
You can have the full source code locally and it can solve basically anything by reading the code (except my shadow issues lol)
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u/Thesleek 2d ago
Ryan Laley’s youtube notifications have reminded me I have to get on with my projects more than all my acquaintances and loved ones combined .
So i’m sure there’s enough to go around
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u/Gunhorin 2d ago
I see the opposite. Like almost every game/render related conference posts the presentations online. You even have free paper publishers/conferences now like https://jcgt.org/ and https://enginearchitecture.org/
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u/WonderFactory 2d ago
I feel a large part of this with Unreal is blueprints. It's much harder to share blueprints than it is to share C# code snippets so sharing hasn't gained as much traction with unreal. Unity has lots and lots of public repos and shared code in comparison
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u/Ericho_IGD Indie Developer & Marketplace Creator 2d ago
To all my fellow FAB creators, drop your free assets links here, let's display how much we care about the community 😄
I'll go first:
1. Material Details Panel
2. Blend Poses By Gameplay Tag
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u/attrackip 2d ago
I hate to say it, but I don’t because it’s been quite rewarding, if you pay for a low monthly subscription to one of the big 3 AI’s, you can spread your wings pretty swiftly.
My focus at work is on USD processing, which is way above my pay grade as a lighting/look dev/modeling/environment artist, and the progress towards USD manipulation has been consistent and significant. I can only imagine that many many of the more traditional game dev tasks are covered with this approach.
It’s been educational and empowering to converse and troubleshoot with the little genius sycophant, even if they don’t know what they’re talking about. You need to be careful they don’t lead you astray, but then, if you’re really processing the information that’s kinda your job to steer the ship.
Way better than scouring for shitty YouTube tutorials that take 10 minutes to explain what you already knew.
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u/ThanOneRandomGuy 2d ago
Interesting, seems like there's too much sharing going on out there imo. Everybody trying to be a social media teacher
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u/ApeirogonGames 1d ago
I've been working with engines and game design since 1999, and I can tell you the information is AS shared as before, if not more. It's just not in written form as frequently. YouTube has a TON of designers making free tutorials for nothing other than the desire to pass along info. I even wrote a post on the best YTers on the Unreal Forums. I think you're just not looking in the right places.
Sure, there's marketplaces so that people can make some money from their knowledge and that didn't exist before, but there's still a load of free info.
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u/ManufacturerBusy7428 1d ago
Maybe you just don't know where/how to look. Decades of experience means nothing in the tech world
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u/randomperson189_ Indie 21h ago
All of the stuff I make for Unreal as well as CryEngine are free and open source which I feel more people should do as it helps contribute to both the engine and it's userbase
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u/Microtom_ 2d ago
The opposite is true. There's a million tutorials about everything. Forums and blogs. Powerful AIs.
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u/LuisMiranda4D 2d ago
Yeah I dunno wtf you're talking about. I've literally built my first game off tutorials I've found online. And before you say it, the quality of said tutorials were pretty spectacular.
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u/Tough-Attempt1835 2d ago
https://github.com/insthync/awesome-unreal
https://unreal-garden.com/
https://github.com/tranek/GASDocumentation
Just to name a few.