Now you can vote on how Epic should improve Unreal Engine 4

Epic has decided to make its Unreal Engine 4 development roadmap public on Trello, allowing anyone to view and vote on proposed improvements like "parallel rendering implementation" or "vehicles." In a company blog post announcing the news, Unreal Engine general manager Ray Davis is quick to point out that "there are many upgrades and fixes going into the engine which are not represented" on the roadmap. By describing potential improvements in broad terms like "improved multiplayer support" the company seems to be trying to solicit feedback from developers on how the engine should evolve, then prioritizing improvements based on that feedback and breaking them down into actionable tasks. Davis took pains to reserve the right not to implement features that are listed on the board, describing the roadmap more as a means by which the company hopes to improve communication and transparency between Epic and its customers. "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," wrote Davis. "This is an experiment for us." This is in line with Epic founder Tim Sweeney's plan to facilitate a "longtime, community-driven relationship between the supplier of software and the users of the software," via Epic's radical new Unreal Engine licensing model, which Sweeney explained in an interview with Gamasutra during GDC 2014.