A number of usability/questions things that I encounter working with UE4: Some of these are small but can be annoying on a day to day basis. Some are probably bugs.
Streaming - I don’t know what level an actor is in
I experience the Scene Outliner - Info: Level to be too subtle and too hidden. If you don’t know that is there, and don’t set the Outliner to display the Level column, then you do not know at all what streaming level a selected actor is in I believe. In UE3 you had the status bar at the bottom show you what level it is in, and I thought that worked really well. Any chance on a status bar somewhere or some other indication what level an actor is in? Also see “Actor Moving and Status bar”
Streaming - It says “Kismet” in the menu
If you hover over the Open Blueprint button in the Levels tab, it says “Open Level Kismet” which seems out of place, given Kismet as name has been removed?
Streaming - I cannot make Blueprint stream my levels
I did as you can see in the image.
This does not make these two levels appear in the viewport. The event is triggered correctly, but no level appears? I have no experience setting this up in UE4 so it may be my fault, but as you don’t seem able to do all that much wrong it is a possible bug?
Custom Events and Remote Events
When you make a Remote Event + Custom Event you can not see if the two are linked other than playing the game. In UE3 a green v showed up if they linked, plus you could double click them to go to their destination/origin. You can do this with Custom+Custom Event, but not with Custom+Remote (and the difference between custom and remote is a bit confusing while we are at it - rename Remote to Remote Custom Event or such maybe?)
Caps/No Caps
UE3 had this nice little feature that when you typed a name in small letters, the editor would automatically convert the case to how the original is written. In other words if you typed the name of a level, say that level is named “CAPSTest”, into a property somewhere (Kismet - Action - Stream Level), and you typed “capstest”, it would automatically convert that to “CAPSTest”. This behaviour was persistent throughout in various parts of the editor. I used this to verify that the editor found what I meant. If I type it in small letters, and the editor changes the case, it means to me that all is ok. I miss that small but nice bit of feedback in Blueprint Remote Events/Streaming Levels for example.
Actor Moving and the Status bar
In UE3 you had a status bar at the bottom that showed you how much you moved an actor. That is missing in UE4 IMO. When you move an actor in UE4 you can see the location update nicely in the details panel, which is nice, but you cannot see just how much you moved it. I have a wall at the moment for example. It is located on Y 2672. When I drag and move this wall, I can see the number update to for example 2352, but that doesn’t really tell me how much I just moved it exactly (320 units). I need to go and actually remember the numbers and calculate the difference to figure that out. Knowing how much I move things helps me with level design. It helps me to know how much I need to move piece B and C, because I remember how much I moved piece A for example, and it helps me keep a view on just how wide the spaces are in my level.
Also UE3’s triangle, vertex, and section count that it displayed in the status bar was nice and informative.
Can you not display some of this information in the dark gray File Edit Window Help bar, on the right side for example? Or above the World/grid/rotation/scale/camera speed buttons, given there is some empty space there?
Panel Snapping - Some windows never snap?
I cannot manage to snap the Content Browser and Message Log windows to anything. They basically only want to snap/merge to each other, but not to another other floating panel or the main viewport/interface? This is probably a bug.
Rotation - Easy to mess up
The Details panel rotation values refuse to change comma numbers. If you type Rotation Y 0.001. And then try to type 0 over it again, it will not accept it. When using the rotation values a lot, often it will make very small changes to the rotation values. For example rotating various things around some I ended up with X 0.0005. Once it did that, you can no longer manually type 0 to clean it up some and you are stuck with 0.0005
Note that in the matrix editor this all works correctly. Just not in the details panel. Not the biggest problem, just a bit unclean.
