Some Advice For Rob

[Hamshtick]

Rob,

First off, it's clear that you have a lot of experience and obviously know what you're doing to the point of repetitive boredom. This is displayed in your videos so much that I think some serious reflection in teaching style is needed on your end. There is a reason the reviews all love this course.....except the ToonTanks section. I want to make it clear that this is not an attack on you, I'm merely addressing the weakest link in the chain, because I really enjoyed the earlier portions of this course and want the course as a unit to succeed.

Expanding on this, you seem to have fallen into the trap that many seasoned software developers fall into, and that is the assumed knowledge on our part as you casually blow through each portion of code, concepts, theory, and practices. Assuming the reason for the speed is to make videos shorter, that reasoning kind of falls apart if you are making a video half as long as the previous instructor, but we have to watch is 3 times or pause 100 times. Not only does this force us to just copy what you're doing without understanding, it's demotivating as a whole. I would assume most people drop the course once this realization is reached.

Let's consider the student's journey up until now, we have gone from a teacher who at every moment shows enthusiasm and a genuine feel of wanting you to learn as he explains the concepts, to someone who is just making videos to get paid. The overwhelming feeling of this course just being something you need to get done to get a paycheck is disappointing.

Wrapping up, I feel you have a lot of potential due to your knowledge of the material, but at the moment I feel like your heart isn't really in this for the teaching and it shows in your videos. Not everyone with knowledge of material is cut out to be a teacher.

[qterrn]

Yeah I too feel this section is quite demotivating. After the last section where everything was explained in detail, here it’s difficult to follow and understand what’s going on lol. Feels like the teacher is talking to pro software engineers
I force myself to get through it because the game is interesting, but man it’s not very fun

[Munsa]

I am doing this section and I am having problems following it. I am doing also the Blueprints course witch I am doing a lot more things that the course explain, on my own, and without problem, and I have never had a problem with c# of the Unity Courses, from here and others more advanced.

I am sorry to say that this section is really difficult to follow. Having made the unity courses, I know what a raycast is, and how it works, but even then, I had problems even to see that that was what we were coding in Unreal.

And that is the problem. There is much code and no enough explanations of what we are trying to do, not only how to do it. I watch the videos and copy two or three lines before I understand, not the code or how it works, but simply what we are trying to accomplish with it. Then I have to rewatch it to understand the flow of the code (how are we implementing it generally speaking), and then rewatch it, and search in internet the no-explained c++ grammar to understand the code itself.

Perhaps it would help a little introduction even with some post-it messages of what we are doing? Like “Now we are trying to implement the Rotation of the Tank turret following the mouse”.

[kamyabnz]

I am so happy that i am not the only that thinks this section is just going faster than the speed of light. I have the feeling he did not look into the last section and see how much we knew and how long it took us to learn those concepts. I am a CS student and work part-time as Java Dev and i can tell you that i had problems following some concepts in this section. I had to put the video playback speed to 0.75 and it still was to fast. I wish they would remake this section, because this is just a shame for the whole course. I mean C++ is not an easy language to grasp because of it being hard on some edges and not being like the new modern high level languages, on top of that the UE4 C++ Variation is just the icing on the cake. So i wish just a bit more care was given into explaining then just writing code. I want to understand it and not just copy the code. If i wanted to do that i would just ctrl + c and ctrl + v the whole GitHub classes or in one click just checkout the project with git.

It is a cool game, that is actually not even that difficult of a concept. But made just impossible to even sit through.

See you guys around.

[Alex_Rusu]

Before starting this section I took the advice at the beggining and tried the old course. It’s been a lot of fun, even though I had lots of bugs and some things felt slow of frustrating, like learning how to use Source Control for the first time and accidentaly breaking all your progress. Even so, I started again from scratch, but it was fun, I I’ve learned a lot. But this guy feels bored, just speeding up everything just to check that the job’s done. I’ve had plenty of bad teachers in my life and I know how to recognise them. Sorry Rob, you are great at development, but clearly not everyone is fit for teaching. I would advise everyone doing this course to try the old one as well, at least the Battle Tanks section because it’s a lot of fun and you’ll learn a lot. It’s about 100 videos and you’ll also learn Source Control. Even though it’s annoying untill you realise what you have to do to make it work, you’ll thank it each time you break your code!

Happy coding!

[Sean-Henry]

The Toon Tanks sessions are so frustrating since there have been dozens and dozens of times that a command has been typed on the screen (impressive typing speed!) and in LITERALLY less than one second the presenter switched to a new tab so that it was impossible to have any idea what commands where typed on the screen. If the presenter let the code stay on the screen for even five seconds it would have made a huge difference in the course. The material wasn’t covered too quickly, the presentations were delivered too quickly. The same words in the same order would have been much more effective if some pauses were thrown in there so that the screen could have been read. In addition since the video player used was poorly supported by Safari on my Mac, the pause button and the restart button seldom worked, so I had to reload the same lectures over and over. Maybe the lectures could be edited, inserting some five second pauses?

Also in every other section, the presenter told us ahead of time, “this is what we are going to do”, then I’d turn off the video and work four or five lessons ahead and compare my result with the lectures. In this series I was not able to do that, since I had no idea what was coming up.

To end on a positive note, the actual content of this section was extremely useful and very important topics were covered. This is starting to get into the real essence of UE4 development.

[scylk]

Well personally I’m much, much more happy with this section than the previous ones.
I don’t like being hold by the hand, these lectures give me the chance to be active in the learning process, by trying to anticipate where it’s going, figuring out what are we doing.
I pause the lectures often and replay parts when I need to, and it’s perfectly fine.

[Munsa]

Having made the whole section 3 times, I have to correct my previous opinion. It is not this section the problem (for me), but that I didn’t fully understand the concepts learnt in the previous ones. I finished the previous chapters with the sensation of having understood the explanations but I really didn’t. So it was in this section I had problems, simply because it when fast over the concepts learned before, to explain new ones.

[Morderkainer]

Totally agree, I feel like I am just copying what he is writing. This section fails in the same problem I see in a lot of Unreal C++ courses, the teacher just says what he is doing, but not explaining at all. He is basically “we create this function, and then we use this to rotate and then this to find the location”, really I had to stop the video and seriously think for a long time what was doing to calculate the FRotator TurretRotation.

Another problem is that he jumps from one file to another all the time, I would prefer just focus on the PawnTank and PawnBase and after it is done, focus only on the PawnTurret, instead create a function on base, then override on tank, then override on turret, then jump back to base to write the content, then jump to the tank again to write the content of the overrided function. Is a chaos to follow.

The proof is the lack of real challenges or Quiz.

PD: I am glad I did the Blueprints course first before this section and some of the stuff sound familiar, Blueprints course guy (sorry don’t remember his name) was great, was easy to follow even when some stuff changed from the version used to 4.26.

[RedSandman]

I agree with some of the above comments. I often have to rewind the videos several times to follow on with the code. I do agree that this is a big jump in complexity and it’s handled at a fast pace. For me, I am just about keeping up but it’s taking a lot longer to absorb the information. I am fortunate because I knew a bit of C++ before this course so some of the inheritance concepts are not new.

I like the different perspective on the C++ coding side and Rob definitely knows his stuff but the new information is not always presented in the best way with a good explanation.

This would be more suited to an intermediate course rather than a beginner course learning C++ and Unreal.

[Otroch]

I am quite happy to read this topic as this section of the Unreal course has really demotivated me. Going through the Escape Room course, it really motivated me, even though I already found that challenging, being completely new to Unreal and C++ (or any other coding language). I went through the extra challenge and spent time to create my own Escape game, a real cool experience.

Now going through this section, all my energy is going into typing along with Rob. Even though I am working with 2 screens, it is still a huge challenge, and more often than not I made a mistake somewhere and it won’t compile, and I spend ages to go through the footage again, trying to pause it exactly in the splitsecond where the code is actually on the screen before Rob opens up something else. After I do this and run the game, yes it works, but I got no idea what I have done and certainly am not able to reproduce it. Very demotivating and I am just trying to power through so I can move on to the next section, praying I don’t miss too much knowledge.

Rob, I can tell you are incredibly smart and you know what you are doing. But best on this section, teaching isn’t your thing man. If you think otherwise, then please try the following tips:

• Leave short breaks between sentences
• Whenever you go over something new, explain the same thing twice, in different words
• Try to assume that the student has minimal prior knowledge. Things they saw in previous sections might have slipped away so it can never hurt to quickly repeat. The power of teaching is really in repeating
• Structure the learning. Start with the goal, go through the process and end with a summary what was done and how it was done. So theory, practice, theory.

[Liyang]

I have a good c++ foundation, so I find this section simple and easy to understand. Rob gets to the point clear and transparent, and I like that very much. But others might not, and I understand that. But still, you shouldn’t expect everything you do not understand to be explained in the tutorial. You can’t expect someone to help you every time you’ve got a problem, you’ve got to fix it yourself. What will you do after you’ve finished this tutorial? Maybe you would want to continue learning Unreal Engine by yourself. What will you do if you encountered a bug in your game then? No one will help you, you will need to search for a solution yourself.

[un1s0n]

“But others might not, and I understand that. But still, you shouldn’t expect everything you do not understand to be explained in the tutorial. You can’t expect someone to help you every time you’ve got a problem, you’ve got to fix it yourself. What will you do after you’ve finished this tutorial?”
Hey Liyang, I’m not sure if you read the description of the course before purchasing it, i’ll provide you what it says though “Created in collaboration with Epic Games. Learn C++ from basics while making your first 4 video games in Unreal”. This is obviously a beginners course, It’s quite fortunate for you that you have a good C++ foundation but others who purchased the course did so in accordance to the idea that we would be getting said C++ foundation from this course. Your ignorance is prevalent hun, that entire comment of yours is invalidating peoples struggles during this course. Not all of us have had the same opportunities to develop a strong C++ foundation like you, which is why we bought this course specifically, to learn c++ along with Unreal Engine, and Rob isn’t really tending to the demographic of the people who purchased this course, hence the people complaining. You are toxiccccc, you’re literally that one college student who thrives on peoples failures rather than motivating them, this isn’t a problem of finding a solution as you stated “What will you do if you encountered a bug in your game then? No one will help you, you will need to search for a solution yourself.” this is a problem of not understanding what the lecturer is saying because he’s moving too fast and not explaining what he’s doing thoroughly, Scratch that, he’s literally not explaining anything… just typing out his thought process disregarding the fact that he’s supposed to be teaching ,not proving that he’s able to make a game.(excuse my grammar I’m not going to reread this)

[un1s0n]

Oh and I’m not really struggling with this section with Rob, I actually don’t mind his teaching style, I just don’t like it