Unreal 4 bad stuff

This is a personal list of what I feel bad using Unreal.

Disclaimer : I still enjoy using Unreal. The more you see, the more I use that engine

Interface

• Rename folder create 2 folders instead
• Delete empty folder doesn’t work most of the time
• Move folder can break links and leave empty folder from source
• You need to right click > Fix up redirector in folder after moving/deleting files to avoid above error
• Animations interfaces are different for each feature (UI (umg), anim blueprint (skeleton animation)) but at the end provide the same features
• You can drag a tab on the main tab. Then when you just want to close that tab, you close the engine my mistake
• Set child transforms in Actor BP are reported at the scene. If you save the save and later modify the actor bp transform without saving the scene, you obtain two different transfrom, even if the child actor is not accessible from the scene
• The editor can be very slow/crash when opening the Output log with many many texts
• You can open the same project twice without warning. This produces multiple issue : can’t have VR inputs on both projects, can’t save files, probably more to come…
• Copy an object doesn’t copy his hierarchy
• You need to restart Unreal if you want to restart Steam VR
• Try to document my code, and found this(still not resolved in almost a year) and that (forbidden question)
• Unreal lock VR input. First started unreal will block all vr input for other unreal instance
• To deactivate an actor blueprint within the editor, you need to take care of all his child actors one by one
• When you log things from blueprint, you cannot click on it to retrieve the corresponding blueprint node (and Unreal denied such things)
• You cannot drag out the main tab, you have to drag each other tab you put with it to make it alone again
• You don’t see runtime generated actor/scene component/whatever within actor

Blueprint

• • Rename or delete function parameters may break all parameters links in every blueprint open blueprints
  • Blueprint system is ~2* slower than cpp (you need to nativize for performance)
  • Find reference of function return all functions with the same name… regardless it is the same
  • Can’t easily set only one parameter of a structure variable
  • Sequence node is really useful since it allows to clean code to do separate action one after one… but sequence part may be executed simultaneously if one branch is slow…
  • You can migrate from lower to higher version. If you migrate from higher to lower version, it will say successful, then when you start the project, some blueprint disappears.
  • Diff Tool works with Blueprint, but Anim blueprint open in text format
  • Copy past blueprint code from a newer version of unreal to a previous one make the engine crash
  • Auto receive input is set to disable by default, whatever I do (even if I set it to player 0 by default in the actor blueprint)

• • Get Orientation and Position is working differently on Vive and on Oculus (Vive is world position, Oculus is relative with a 90° offset)

• • When quickly iterating your blueprint code, you are not saving your blueprint. So when you do crash, you lose all your works

• No way to get all sound of a specific class. If you need to stop all sounds from a specific class, you play a blank sound as many time as the concurrency allows it
• No way to directly drive animation blueprint variables

Anim BP

• No « any state » available, (result of adding many switch)
• No way in/way out with one variable. You have to do == in one way, and != in the other way separatly
• Find the error

C++

• Not the same naming convention between Blueprint and C++
• You can use outdated binaries while the code cannot compile anymore
• Hard to rename a c++ project
• UInputComponent : You can bin/Unbind Action but you cannot unbind Axis
• foreach(var name in array) dont work : you must use for (var name : array)
• To use interface, you must first create an empty UInterface… then an IInterface and use that last one…
• Try to remove a c++ class….

Build

If you make a build in Shipping, then a buid in DebugMode, your Debug mode will crash ! You need to clean the destination directory for each build

When you package, your project folder must have the same name as your project & the path must not be too long (it crash, displaying error about c++) code)

If you start with a higher version of the project (lets say, project is 4.24.3 & your engine is 4.24.2), the engine just close without any notification

Shader

Object position is per instance for position but for one object for color…

Help

Multiple help/FAQ forum from Epic https://forums.unrealengine.com/ https://answers.unrealengine.com/ (use the last one if you want answers, and even better, use Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/unrealengine/) and maybe more

Unity

Resources.Load doesn’t automatically refresh resources file. Older file may be retrieved if runing in editor

No way to have multiple Game Window