I have a couple of marketplace plugin submissions in progress, and some more planned. There are some questions and issues that have come up in the process of submission that I still don’t have good answers to:
- Compiler error/warning levels.
Epic are using Clang to test plugin builds, with very strict compiler errors. Some of the generated warnings and errors cannot be reproduced when building with MSVC, which makes it a frustrating and very slow (the marketplace submission process doesn’t need more things slowing it down) back and forth task to try to stamp out errors by guessing what the cause may be, resubmitting and waiting to hear back from Epic with updated build output.
If Epic continue to expect people’s submissions to conform to Clang compilation settings, surely we should have instructions on setting up Clang builds. As far as I’m aware though, this requires an engine source build, and Clang compatibility still seems to be very unstable.
- Structure of deployed code (project vs plugin).
I’m still not clear on what the final submission structure of a marketplace plugin will be. Is it the plugin directory only (with .uplugin, source and content), or can/should there be an accompanying example project (with .uproject and it’s own source and content) which uses the plugin?
Some initial code review feedback on one of my submissions gave me the impression only a plugin folder was expected. However, the second approach above makes a lot more sense to me - not only does it allow clear demonstration to buyers of how the plugin can be used in a project, but it also means all example content can go into the example project, leaving the plugin streamlined with only the core code and content. This will prevent people’s own projects from being bloated by unnecessary content when they incorporate the plugin.