[HN Gopher] The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline
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The Unreal Engine Wiki is now permanently offline
Author : Pulcinella
Score : 66 points
Date : 2020-03-31 21:21 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (forums.unrealengine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (forums.unrealengine.com)
| erichocean wrote:
| I always wonder why companies do stupid things--like this.
|
| At the very least, put it in read-only maintenance mode, with a
| big disclaimer at the top saying so.
|
| But to just _destroy_ information, information about _your own
| product_ , is...well, it's stupid. Profoundly so.
| egwynn wrote:
| By the looks of the most recent snapshot on archive.org[0],
| that's what they did.
|
| [0]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200329185200/https://wiki.unre...
|
| EDIT: It seems like the main problem is that they didn't do a
| good job communicating their intention and timeline for
| removing the old wiki.
| opencl wrote:
| It had been in read-only maintenance mode for quite a while.
| Then they just took the whole thing down with no warning. The
| wayback machine copy unfortunately seems to be missing a lot
| of articles.
| rwnspace wrote:
| I think corporate upper management are the only echelon of
| business capable of such waste and cynicism, maybe they noticed
| that traffic was going to the wiki and not the dedicated
| support pages.
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| In my experience this sort of decision is always driven by
| sales / marketing people deciding they want to funnel the users
| into some other part of the site that nobody currently uses
| because it's not as good.
| richardboegli wrote:
| > So why can't we put a read-only archive online currently?
|
| > The Wiki, even in it's read-only state, was presenting security
| risks, and it was deemed necessary to take it offline.
|
| https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/announcements-...
| tvbusy wrote:
| Sounds like someone accidentally deleted it and they have no
| backup. Instead of admitting to not having a backup, they can
| just say it was intentionally shutdown, and ask their staff to
| salvage whatever is available from archives.
| pfundstein wrote:
| My first thought as well, but my second thought was why
| wouldn't they own up to it? Surely they know that owning up to
| something like this earns them much more respect and positivity
| from the community than "taking it down" for no good reason, or
| worse trying to cover it up.
| AA-BA-94-2A-56 wrote:
| Here is the Linking DLLs wiki page discussed in the forum thread:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20181004001430/https://wiki.unre...
| Traster wrote:
| The thing that seems super strange to me is that they don't seem
| to have warned people they would do this, the first comment is
|
| > This isn't very helpful, Amanda! I know that the wiki wasn't
| optimal, but there were many wiki pages developers like me had
| bookmarked for years beacuse they contained comprehensive and
| easy information, which is now missing. Why not just keep the
| wiki read-only online? Just to retain the old pages? I'm pretty
| lost right now without some of these articles and I don't
| understand why the only option you had was to completely disable
| it. Please think about opening it up again just for read. I don't
| care about the maintenance mode, but the wiki was an important
| learning point, which is now gone.
|
| If you don't want to support the wiki that's fine, you don't owe
| anyone hosting, but if you're going to dump it, atleast give
| someone the opportunity to scrape the site and host it
| themselves.
| [deleted]
| stolen_biscuit wrote:
| Bonehead move. Leave it up as read-only and mark when pages are
| out of date so users can look for up-to-date information
| elsewhere. Hope they come to their senses and re-upload a read-
| only archive of the documentation
| rs23296008n1 wrote:
| I never understand why companies do this. Its very developer
| hostile.
|
| Are they having financial problems? Surely Fortnite is keeping
| the lights on...
|
| Could be a signal of underlying management confusion/instability.
| Might need to reassess.
| axlee wrote:
| You could host that wiki for ten bucks a month.
| rs23296008n1 wrote:
| Depends on traffic/content, but yeah text is cheap.
|
| Might grab a copy of the archive for reference then local
| host it. We've got a ton of internal references that will be
| broken.
|
| We haven't touched UE for about 10 months.
| jokoon wrote:
| Since I started using Ogre3D I always had a hard time settling
| down to feature rich engines like unreal or unity.
|
| I don't know how often, giving beginners access to a space
| shuttle, will it lead to a successful project that can compete
| with non-indie game developers.
|
| There is also a fine line between an indie team of developers who
| can benefit from those tools, and experienced game developers who
| would not need them.
|
| It seems unreal and unity are just very capable, but cheap, tools
| that are well-marketed towards students and beginners. The
| problem is, once those developers learned to use those tools,
| they are still unable to develop a game without those tools,
| which is a huge win for unity and unreal.
|
| Generally I tend to believe unreal and unity only enable
| developers to make games that will never be able to compete with
| more established and skilled game developers. I think it's a
| pretty sad situation, because initially I really believe indie
| games were able to compete with those big studios, but they're
| not, and I think unity and unreal are responsible for this. It
| seems the whole FOSS mantra/paradigm/philosophy has a lot of
| trouble penetrating the field of game development, maybe because
| games are heavily monetized towards consumers, unlike other
| softwares. It bothers me.
| ngold wrote:
| As a noob, I've found learning c++ in unity pretty
| comprehensive. I can also look at how real code works looking
| through what others have done. And the youtube tutorial section
| is huge. At the end of the day I can't wait to know enough to
| jump ship to godot.
| ironmagma wrote:
| What engines are you suggesting make it easier to create those
| games that compete? My experience is that UE4 and Unity are
| both enabling of indie developers to make very high quality
| games. The only real limitations are how much effort you put
| into the art. UE4, while hard to code for, is still orders of
| magnitude less work than coding all the rendering, animation,
| and hardware logic from scratch. There are of course other
| engines, but they are either devoid of the features you need to
| compete with AAA titles, or have severe performance
| limitations.
| philipov wrote:
| Do you think Godot is either missing necessary features or
| has severe performance limitations?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Currently its missing necessary features. The roadmap looks
| good but I can't ship on a road map.
| philipov wrote:
| I've been looking at Godot for a hobby project. Could you
| please describe what features you need from it that it's
| missing?
| jayd16 wrote:
| The biggest for me is the fact they're rewriting the
| graphics stack. The churn is enough but I also just don't
| like "fixed"/"simplified"/"helpful" tools that hide the
| underlying platform. Unity's shader language is extremely
| ugly but at least I can use raw GLSL if I have to. I've
| had to use custom pragmas to get certain acceleration
| features to work on Samsung hardware that doesn't seem
| possible in Godot. Hopefully the updates with Vulkan will
| have more flexibility.
|
| That said, for a hobby project it seems fine.
| daenz wrote:
| I used the wiki extensively in my last UE4 project. It had its
| warts, but it also had valuable information that _did not exist
| anywhere else._ Taking this down without a torrent mirror or a
| grace period is phenomenally harmful to the community. Bad move!
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(page generated 2020-03-31 23:00 UTC)