The Seven Voyages Of SteveMar 3, 2023

Finally started watching a (long!) video about the UE Gameplay Ability System. I'd tried to get a sense for it from the written docs, but they just don't go into enough detail on how & why you might use it in practice. More like 1 paragraph on each bit & then "go read the Lyra source". Needing to watch a *3h* video has been a blocker on me bothering to dig more before now.

I don't think it's something I'll use on this game, but I can definitely see the utility. Just a lot of moving parts!

Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of SteveMar 3, 2023
Tech industry, please hire more writers. I can happily read docs for 3h and get much more out of them than watching a video for 3h. And while I'm watching the video, I'm making copious notes so that I don't have to watch the video *again* later to refresh my memory. If it was written down in the first place with good indexing I wouldn't have to do that. Video is such a crap way to document things.
Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of SteveMar 3, 2023
I know that the excuse for this is “young people like video”, but I call BS on that. I think the *real* reason is that with video you can repurpose your existing dev talent and not have to hire tech writers. Just put the most cogent of your devs in front of the camera for an afternoon, job done right? Shared skill set, no need for writing specialism or ongoing editing / maintenance, just stick the video online and point to that for the next 3 years. Absolutely says cost cutting to me
Show threadMartin KiftMar 3, 2023
@sinbad unless videos are correctly chaptered up, which from my experience epics rarely are, then not only are they terrible to “browse” for information but they are terrible to maintain as well.. hence the number of out of date videos on YouTube on most unreal topics, esp from epic themselves.
Show threadThe Seven Voyages Of SteveMar 3, 2023
@MouseByTheSea this one is chaptered which I guess makes it better than the average, but still. I honestly think that there being a tacit acceptance that video is usually out of date in some way is a "feature" for publishers, vastly reduces the ongoing effort required versus maintaining good documentation
Show threadMartin KiftMar 3, 2023
@sinbad thinking on, a chaptered video would in theory allow one to re-record chapters to keep the video up to date - in reality, I don’t recall ever seeing this done.
Show threadMatt Mascarenhas
@MouseByTheSea @sinbad Oh, I like this idea, and can pretty readily imagine how to do it (as someone who both indexes videos, and fancies a world in which our messages in whatever medium are generally editable and may be referenced by version).
Mar 3, 2023 at 5:01pmWeb