When we launched UE4 three years ago, we sought ways to make development more accessible and be more transparent to our community of users. This was the underpinning of a lot of our decisions and efforts, including features like publicly downloadable builds via the launcher, real-time GitHub replication of our internal Perforce checkins, and our public UE4 development roadmap hosted on Trello.
It’s been a busy couple of years, and we’ve absorbed a ton of feedback about our release lifecycle and how we deliver our plans and product to the community. We reflected on our public roadmap and what we could do to make it better serve our users, and we’re happy to announce we have rolled out a big roadmap update refining how we present and communicate our feature plans.
Our goals with this update revolve around delivering higher quality information to the community:
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Give clear visibility on discrete features and improvements we’re lining up for delivery.
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Put more focus on when features will be available (rather than describing when we are working on them).
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Emphasize posting items whose timeline and completion we’re confident about.
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Organize the board around release points, as opposed to our internal team structure.
These changes to how we conceptualize roadmap-worthiness mean you won’t find a one-to-one map for everything on our previous roadmap to a card on our new board. We’ll represent large projects as concrete feature sets coming in specific releases. Wishlist and backlog items are almost always too far out and uncertain to meet the confidence level for including (although, that does not mean we’ve abandoned them). And we’ve removed voting from this new version of our public roadmap, because we are now only listing features we plan on doing.
We’ll post updates and new cards on a monthly basis, so watch for the upcoming release’s column to fill in new announcements over time about additional features and improvements we’re intending to include, and expect even more happening behind the scenes.
You can visit our new roadmap here. We hope you enjoy this new incarnation and that it aids the development of your projects by providing better consistency, visibility and expectations. We’d also love your feedback! Let us know what you think about these changes and any other suggestions that can help us serve you, the Unreal Engine development community.