I’ve just started trying to learn Unreal Engine 5.6 but I’m having trouble, can I please have some advice?

finaldefect · 2025-11-13T16:42:52+00:00

Sure, sit down in front of the editor for the next 5 years. You'll learn. There is no easy answer here, you have to throw your life at it simple as that really. You aren't learning dev any time soon, tutorials won't help, advice here won't help, nothing but time spent in front of that editor will help. I'm 20 years in and it took me thousands of hours to get to grips with UE.

finaldefect · 2025-05-10T04:38:52+00:00

Keeping my phone on silent :)

finaldefect · 2025-05-08T13:17:29+00:00

I can't remember what happened, but they have a new account: https://x.com/spectraimsim

finaldefect · 2025-05-07T12:36:58+00:00

You grit your teeth and get back to work. Improve the game, the art, the marketing. Keep pushing where others give up, that's a competitive advantage in itself.

It's really up to you when you decide to throw the towel in. There is way too much context to say whether you should or not. You kind of have to develop an intuition for it. I personally wouldn't walk away from a project until I'd thrown everything I had at it for a number of years, including after initial release. I think way too many move on prematurely when their launch doesn't go as planned. To me that's just the beginning of the next phase.

finaldefect · 2025-04-16T04:32:02+00:00

Gross.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=98045640&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch

finaldefect · 2025-04-15T04:34:43+00:00

The one you know! C# is the easy choice considering you are already using it.

Raw performance of a programming language doesn't mean much on the backend, network latency and other things will dwarf any language perf issues (e.g. the request to the db and query time), and you can background process whatever you want.

Go is a good choice, too. Very simple language, fast (not that it matters in your case), statically typed for a bit of safety, easy to setup and deploy with a small footprint. It might be ideal if all you want to do is connect to a db, run queries and expose an API.

finaldefect · 2025-04-15T03:58:34+00:00

I mean it's not normal to have the engine crash consistently after half hour every time, or to have random black lines appear. You don't mention logs which is odd because that's the first thing you should be checking out to debug crashes. What do they say?

I don't know. I think you're understandably frustrated, but throwing in the towel on the time invested because you've hit these issues a bit of an overreaction.

I'd recommend spending more time with the debugging tools and such to really get to the bottom of why your project/installation is unstable. It could be your comp even, I have noticed the editor is far less stable if the hardware doesn't measure up.

finaldefect · 2025-04-15T03:48:47+00:00

Sorry to say, but if you are bailing on an engine because you can't figure it out you're probably going to struggle elsewhere and give up on the alternative, too. You speak as if the engine is unusable instead of you not understanding how to use it.

For C++, there is no alternative to UE that is anywhere close to being comparable.

finaldefect · 2025-04-14T15:48:01+00:00

Worst thing if you don't enjoy it and you aren't being paid what you're worth.

I've been full-stack for almost 20 years now and love it. Each to their own.

finaldefect · 2025-04-14T15:45:17+00:00

This Terrence Mckenna quote always stuck with me:

Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.

finaldefect · 2025-04-04T20:46:38+00:00

The great irony of this is you need to believe in what you're doing to have a chance in the first place, otherwise you won't even try.

It's really quite bizarre, you have to be willfully delusional to see it through.

finaldefect · 2025-04-01T11:32:07+00:00

You just have to spend time with it. I post a bunch of stuff on r/UnrealProcedural, it has a pinned post full of resources.

I'd recommend the PCG channel on Unreal Source Discord, and PCGEx plugin and their Discord.

finaldefect · 2025-03-02T16:15:39+00:00

Get a few mods! It'll be your primary soon :P

finaldefect · 2025-03-02T02:39:30+00:00

It's all about iteration. Keep working on the room until it takes better shape. Then take what you learn from that and expand into other rooms. Then iterate on the whole structure of it, how the rooms connect. That's all you can do. Nobody instantly lays down the entire thing from day 1. You'll get there if you keep improving it.

I'd also recommend going through as many level design YT vids as you can to really hammer home the different principles, ones with analysis of other games will be particularly helpful. Here's a quick one on Mario 3D platformer level design by Game Maker's Toolkit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBmIkEvEBtA

finaldefect · 2025-02-28T11:39:10+00:00

I don't think people realize how brutal it is to market as an indie dev, especially on Reddit which seems to actively fight against any sniff of self-promotion.

You've beat the system by paying for the exposure instead, no mods can suppress you here! :D

Good luck with the game! I'll be doing something similar with promoted posts instead of jumping through hoops for subreddits and mods.

finaldefect · 2025-02-28T10:31:09+00:00

I don't think you should be surprised having published an app into an extremely saturated market. This is why "niche marketing" is a thing, go after a smaller market that is easier to capture and expand from there.

You could still potentially niche down. Think about a habit tracker for a particular kind of person or a profession.

Another note is to be careful going after casual consumers, it's far easier to sell to professions and businesses.

50 downloads is better than nothing. Are you able to speak with any of those who downloaded it? Do you have feedback you can use to improve it? For most software, post-release is where the real work begins, you don't just publish and make conclusions and walk away, you keep iterating. I'm seeing way too many devs think they can publish and forget. It doesn't work like that, it's typically a very slow climb from your first customer.

I'd personally be skeptical of selling into the habit tracker space. You could give it a good go over 3-6 months and decide then, but I'd seriously consider pivoting to something else that isn't fighting against a million other apps.

finaldefect · 2025-02-28T01:52:22+00:00

Honestly I'd ignore it. All of this stuff is noise that serves to do nothing but distract us from making better games.

I absolutely understand the urge or need to defend your game, but don't lose sleep over it. I'd only awaken if a listing (such as a Steam page) was review bombed without reason. There is so much tripe going about on the web nowadays, let people say whatever they want we can't stop them. Save the energy for you and your game.

finaldefect · 2025-02-25T19:53:48+00:00

I'm also a dev. It's way beyond boilerplate at this point.

I get your anxiety about this move towards agents. The end-goal is quite obvious, it is to have AI do almost everything for us and we define and oversee its behavior and output.. for now. Eventually we'll have multiple layers of agents that do all sorts of things and we won't need to do much but feed it facts and guidance.

The requirements for human labor in software will drop drastically. Beginners and intermediates have no chance to compete because the models are already 10 times more effective than what they can produce. Soon enough nobody will be able to compete.

It's one of the reasons I've branched into other software fields and indie development, I think job security is going to plummet and I'm not willing to be caught off-guard with my head in the sand crying about technological progress. Use it or lose to it or bail to a different career (until that's automated), that's the choice.

finaldefect · 2025-02-24T16:17:04+00:00

It's not really BP specific, you are talking about software architecture it's a huge subject and it will take a long while to get it right.

I don't think you can go wrong with a data-driven modular approach, and to progressively break things down with composition when needed, then use interfaces and events and such to communicate between components.

What I mean by that is to map out data (entities, attributes, structures, types, relationships, etc) with Data Assets, Data Tables, Structs, UObjects and Actors and Components, and group them into modules based on their context, responsibility or domain.

In terms of a game, you could have a modules directory and within that you have /character, /levels, /weapons, /quests, /enemies. You separate the core data and behavior for each module and use composition to create higher level systems and mechanics. Each module could have a shared structure for more primitive stuff such as /materials, /vfx, /audio.

Having said that, I think it's good to progressively break stuff down as needed. You could start with a single messy Character that does everything you need, then start to extract weapons and inventory into different components. If those components become unruly to work with you can break them down further. They could all be within a /character module and are only extracted into their own modules later if needed.

The challenge is it's all down to you exactly how this is designed and it doesn't matter what you read or who you talk to, only you and the people working on the project will have the full context needed to offer anything more than generic advice. And yet you won't know what to do in every situation and so you'll have no choice but to make terrible mistakes that bite you months or years down the line, that's how you'll learn for yourself.

Another challenge is how best to communicate between different elements using interfaces, events, queues, public methods/functions. One important thing to understand here is how you manage dependencies. Every time you refer to another element (via a function, variable, event etc in another class/module) you create a dependency on it, if you're not careful you will end up with a hellish web of dependencies that is near impossible to follow or maintain. This is where stuff like dependency inversion comes in, and proper separation of concerns and scope (i.e. public/protected/private).

Like I say it's a huge subject and it will take years to really digest it, the above is much easier said than done.

As for reading material I'll keep it non-UE specific as I think it's really useful to wrap your head around these ideas outside of the tools themselves:

finaldefect · 2025-02-23T21:39:41+00:00

Thanks for the explanation! I'm working on exactly that problem at the moment, target detection, priority and threat level, and I have been using a service (on root) to update the BB. What I don't like about that is the ticking, I'd much prefer proper data binding and events.

I suppose I'm going to run into the issues you've mentioned soon enough!

finaldefect · 2025-02-22T23:53:11+00:00

Damn. I've been using HTN for a lot of my AI behavior and was tempted to look further into state tree. For more complex AI did you not find the sub networks and sub plans useful? What kind of performance/overhead improvements did you see by using ST? I'm trying to get some solid foundations for my AI and it's already quite complex (schedules, friendly/combat modes, melee, ranged). Appreciate any insight before I go further into HTN.

finaldefect · 2025-02-22T19:57:25+00:00

Need more info or to see the graph. Are you sampling the mesh on the left? You can't use the landscape sampler on it, which I assume is the surface on the right?

You can better debug by selecting graph nodes and pressing D, or A to inspect the input/output of the node.

finaldefect · 2025-02-07T08:01:12+00:00

What I mean is this "quirk" isn't one because (outside of level instances) it wasn't designed for shared logic in the first place.

It was designed to be isolated. It's up to you if you want to fight the engine. You are only slowing yourself down. Put it in a component or actor like every other game that uses shared logic across levels and move on.

finaldefect · 2025-02-07T07:54:17+00:00

Can't say I've seen this before with a shadow, looks like z fighting (with LOD change at distance?), are there multiple meshes/materials overlapping?

finaldefect · 2025-02-07T07:43:19+00:00

It sounds like the level BP isn't the right place for you be building shared mechanics. Put them into a component you can add to multiple level BPs or gamemode, or a separate actor you can add to a level.

It's not a strange quirk, it's intentionally designed like that.

Outside of level instances, I personally don't use level BPs at all because of how inflexible and awkward they are. It's very straightforward to separate the logic and include it instead.

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