Nevermind, let's ask the question.

What is the learning curve for Unreal engine? How long does it take an average person to get proficient with the engine?

i know there's an online documentation so far.

Having used Unity and currently learning Unreal, I'd say that it takes more time to learn Unreal. I learned by making a scene that contained miscellaneous stuff like working doors, timeline animated objects and materials etc. written both in C++ and Blueprints. The issue I ran into was that most of the tutorials are for Blueprints, but I'm more familiar with C++. In general, it doesn't take many days to get something working.

Nevermind, let's ask the question.

What is the learning curve for Unreal engine? How long does it take an average person to get proficient with the engine?

i know there's an online documentation so far.

It depends on your experience levels. Before using UE4, I wrote my own engine from scratch. Picking up UE4 took me about 1 month of full time effort to get to a point where I knew how to be proficient. It took about 3 months of full time effort to become an advanced user. My technique was to just dive right in and start building, and leaning on my existing knowledge about how to build games and scenes.

For someone with no programming experience or experience building games, it will take a lot longer. You won't just be learning about how to use an engine, you'll be learning about the engine agnostic stuff, like "what is a vector? what is a dot product? how do I use trigonometry to make games? how do I write good AI? What is a for loop?" etc. If you dedicated a lot of time, you could get really good at this in about 6 months. I think I'd put UE4 and Unity both at 6 months for 100% proficiency.

I don't know about unity, but there are hundreds of youtube videos for UE4 which can get you started at any experience level. The engine developers also do two live twitch streams every week, so if you have a burning question, you can ask them live and they'll be able to give you an answer.

I really like your quotations and was attempting to return it the same way.

But yeah, let's list it then:
1. Yeah, i'm too stupid but i want to understand this lean "CPU, GPU hardware print." Baking took awhile and it creates something about 300 MB.
Also everytime i need to build "shaders" it takes too long. I just want to render flat shaders, like handpainted textures, and it always goes back and render like 100 thing in the background. And i could never get flat shaders from it, and the forum gave me no solution.
2. Clearly. it's not a sausage machine. it's a cow butchering, meat refinery factory. See answer one again.
3. it's not stylized. Basicaly i'm removing everything from lightmass, shadows, motionblur into raw stuff, just texture and mesh.
4. again, it's an answer i found somewhere, that flat shading is not supported in unreal.
5. cheers. I think unreal is solid too. Stable, but man, it's heavy in visual. I want it stable and lean, and unity can provide it much faster than unreal in blueprint and cpp.
What a shame since i still can't find the solution to strip it all.
6. i am glad that it's lacking splashscreen. Clarification: since unity needs you to pay for pro to remove splashscreen.
7. blender game engine is out of the question for now. What i meant is that since python library needs to be reinstalled everytime the runtime is created.
but that's an entire different story.


But i suppose all these counter argument of mine is just making it all messy.
I want to use Unreal, but apparently it keeps going on' Building shaders(100 something)' and i can't get it to make simpler games.
i have like zero programming skill and to wait until i am "proficient", will i even get to ship a game?
That's the question.

1. Okay, I remember a while back I had a "problem" with the engine always compiling shaders. It was nearly constant on my computer, but my artists computer never had that problem. After a bit of investigation, I figured out that it was a problem with my CPU. I didn't have enough cores on it, so the compile shader thread was not a background thread and it kept on interrupting my work flow. So, I went out and bought a high end processor and the problem took care of itself.

3. You can remove a ton of shader code by unchecking a bunch of default properties. Don't want lighting and shadows? Make your shader unlit. Don't want shadows? Turn off "casts shadows" on the mesh. Got a favorite shader material but want to tweak a few settings? Make it a dynamic material instance and change shader properties on the fly! There's a lot of advanced stuff available with the shader system, but just because there are advanced capabilities doesn't mean you have to use them. They're there if you ever need them though ;)

If you're brave, you can also write your own HLSL code and inject it into the UE4 shader as a "code" node. You can come up with a super simple vertex shader and pixel shader, and ignore the other stuff, like fragment shaders and geometry shaders. I personally use custom HLSL code very sparingly since the engine can't optimize it.