Epic publishes UE4 development roadmap

Epic has published a roadmap for Unreal Engine 4 in an effort to generate feedback that will allow it to shape the direction of its game engine better.

The engine maker said it hopes that by being more transparent in its development processes it will “generate more value for developers working with UE4, both in understanding what’s likely to appear in upcoming releases and also in having more context around how the engine is being built”.

The roadmap details the engine’s core categories and then a list of individual features that are being worked on or considered by Epic.

However, Epic stressed anything listed in the current version may not make it into the engine as planned, due to complications that push out a feature or internal reasons to stop working on it altogether.

Some items are also defined as being on Epic’s backlog list, so may never see the light of day, as they are ideas that have not yet been approved for production.

Unreal Engine 4 launched in March with a new subscription model that aims to make the development toolbox more attractive to a wider range of developers. The engine’s 4.1 update arrived a month after launch, and Epic said it included over 100 improvements in that release alone, so developer can expect many more changes over the coming months.

Epic added: “This is one step of many we plan to take to build full transparency around our development process. It’s important to us that we’re building what developers want and need to ship their own successful projects, and steps like these will facilitate a better ongoing conversation about what that ends up being.”

See the UE4 roadmap on Trello.

Epic is also inviting developers to comment on its current roadmap on the Unreal Engine forums.