Hello guys I am new here. I just got my user name and password from epic last night so I havent done much with the editor yet but I have some suggestions after looking at it a little bit.
Suggestions:
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Add the ability to change the UI Color’s in the editor (this is a feature I wish was in the UE3 UDK and now Rocket
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Use the dock UI from the GT.TV Exclusive look episode. It looked much more intuitive than it does now.
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Give the BluePrint nodes more understandable names. Even though I know a little C++ and programming I can see
how they could confuse a non programmer. If you guys are trying to make this easy for the artist you better hope
they have a little bit of a background in programming.
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Give us a way to build our game’s/mini’s to pc/mac/android/xbox/etc… I would like to be able to view the game
in other mediums other than the editor.
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Include some content like you guys did with UDK [Unreal Tournament Content] It would make people get into it
more and not loose motivation by having to create things just to try and work with BluePrints/C++/etc…
Thats all I have for now but I will be back after actually attempting to use the editor. I will probably be able to fully do that when I get out of school on the 19th of this month.
For now Keep Making 
I have to comment on blueprints, Im really not sure that artists should be the ones using the tool! I think the people we would be referring to are designers, they may have art backgrounds and/or programming backgrounds but I do think the distinction should be made. Without an understanding of the core concepts and the drive to learn Im not sure anyone could achieve the desired results with even the most easily explained mathematical toolkits. Artists do have a headstart with knowledge of geometry and perhaps biology but in terms of pure logic, set theory, probability and numerous other mathematical fields its going to be difficult to design games and thats what we’re talking about here not purely art.
I do know games can be seen as art but their foundations and creation is not entirely so.
Alot of things you mention will just take time, Epic have mentioned making more templates available and Im sure we’ll get more tech demo tests as we go along.
got to comment about game templates, your lucky we only had 1 to start with
it’s been mentioned and things are being planned afaik and the stuff in the templates will get polished as time is available
Hi Chris,
I’ve been looking into your questions and comments. I have a few answers for you.
- I have entered a feature request for custom UI color and included a note that I also wanted the ability to color-code tabs.
- Blueprint Node names are based off of C++ code naming conventions, so they probably shouldn’t be altered unless they do no coincide with C++. If there are any specific node that you are confused about that are not explained in the Help Documentation, please let me know and I will find out.
- Could you clarify your issue with “building your game”? Do you mean you are having difficulty playing from outside the editor or are you unable to cook?
- New demo content will be arriving with commented Blueprints. Using those, you should be able to learn quite a bit on your own, but F1 help documentation has some great introductory BP tutorials as well.
Let me know about anything else I can help you with. Hope this has helped.
Thanks,
Alexander
Well thank you very much for your answers and for submitting the colored tabs suggestion. In the third one I did mean to cook I just used build for some reason. Maybe for the BluePrint nodes there could be alternate names for non programmers and in the preferences tab you can have an option to switch it from artist mode to programmer mode. This will allow non programmers to make program’s and the programmers to translate them into code when the time comes for that in the production process.
Im just trying to understand what it is you are asking in regards to having ‘artist terminology’, one that perhaps springs to mind is renaming lerp to some kind of blend or smooth but that shouldnt be confused with normalize. The terms should be consistent across all aspects of the editor not just exclusive to the blueprint editor as it uses basically the same terminology used within the material, particle, etc editors.
Hi Chris,
It seems that the version of Rocket Beta that is currently released does not have the files to support cooking yet. In the coming months, we are planning on adding that, so please stay up on your builds.
-Alexander
Give the BluePrint nodes more understandable names.
Were there any nodes that were particularly confusing? We are trying to walk the line between the ‘technically correct’ term (so C++ and Blueprint programmers are speaking the same language) and a ‘helpful’ term (so designers can find what they are looking for!). We are adding keywords to some nodes to also facilitate searching (e.g. adding keyword ‘log’ to the ‘PrintString’ node).
Personally I like the more technically correct terms and thats not just because I happen to have some background in programming. As a designer you have to be very concise about what it is you want to achieve and everyone needs to be on the same page, having a separate terminology for artists and programmers will just drive more of a wedge between the two instead of converging them.
I do have some suggestions but they dont include obfuscation.
- Would be to use the same wildcards that arrays are using on the base operators. This will make it easier to find the one youre after and for people without as much programming background its less type safe by the use of generics.
- In regards to renaming, List is a perfectly acceptable alternative to Array if people are intimidated by the terms.
The biggest discrepancy I can see is not with the terminology but the categories and that some of the nodes fit in multiple categories. A simple search using the rightclick menu solves that issue though, for instance searching for Rand will return all results not just those under the ‘random’ category. This feature really needs to be exploited as much as possible being akin to auto-complete in IDE’s or commandline in programs like autocad.
The only one (even as a programmer) I found particularly confusing was the Get Rotation XVector I really dont know why some things are labelled getters and others dont require it but I do understand the distinction needs to be made between setters and getters.
To finish up by reiterating on no.1, there are alot of duplicate nodes that are only there for the single purpose of being type specific, BuildString, To (Type) and the Bitwise operators not just the mathematical operators. This would be extremely powerful for people of all backgrounds.