Hey everyone! I’ve been pondering about we can discover Unreal Engine forks on GitHub with cool and interesting projects or engine hacks, even if they are works in progress. There are thousands of forks of UE4 out there, and I think it would be fun to highlight activity in these. Does anyone have suggestion for how we can detect and surface cool projects more easily on GitHub?
–Mike
Hi Mike
Could you use a version of the Trello board to make posts on Github branches? What I am thinking is that people could then vote on what branches they think are promising or interesting to them.
It’s not a bad idea. I’m just wondering on how we can find the interesting forks in the first place. GitHub doesn’t seem to make it very easy to explore an organization’s network of forks. They do have a Network Graph feature but it doesn’t work with large networks like ours, and I’ve found it to be a bit clumsy anyway. It would be awesome to see a third party tool that makes it easy to explore and locate cool commits happening in the network! Does anything like that exist already?
Not aware of any tools, but maybe a Sub-Forum in this sub-forum for people to create threads / discussion about their PR’s?
Might result in a bit of forum-ception though… but possibly generate good ideas discussion on people’s submissions.
Hi Mike,
You know, there are always cool PRs (some from many months ago even) sent into Epic’s main tree, that appear to have been forgotten as they got pushed to page 2 or 3. Perhaps someone at Epic could be dedicated to checking those out on a regular basis instead of letting them linger…
#justsaying
Else, to do what you suggest above, if it was me I’d probably write a spider in Python that could cruise all forks and commits looking for interesting (pre-set) keywords. Probably run it from one of your AWS instances even. 
I know of the Allegorithmic and Nvidia branches but at 30GB each any other branch would have to offer something pretty amazing for me to download and compile it.
They absolutely do not get forgotten. 
We track all of these in our issue database and we have a community team that works with programmers to make sure we follow up to all contributors. It is still a process that we’re learning about and improving as we go. Feedback is always welcome! Sometimes we accumulate a backlog of changes because the “owner” of a specific system may be very busy on a project, but we’ll always circle back and try to get these submissions integrated!
That’s sort of what I was thinking too. This seems like a feature that GitHub probably would benefit to providing to customers in some form, rather than manually scraping it. But it would be a cool script to write nevertheless!
Thanks for the ideas so far.
–Mike
“Interesting forks” is a loaded question. Interesting to whom?
I feel your pain Mike. How would you determine interest. Would you look at which ones are downloaded the most on the thought that ones most downloaded are the ones people are most interested in? And how do you determine which forks are even still valid with the current build of the engine? I think TheJamsh has a good answer in that we would need some sort of sub-forum area to basically discuss which forks would be useful to include in the engine. It would also seem that you will ultimately need someone from Epic with a pretty good knowledge of the engine to give the fork’s identified a look over and rate the merits of the fork.