Heads Together : Plugins

This is the first of a (potential) series of threads made under the banner of “Heads Together.” If it is a success I’ll do more, but it will be a community effort and success or failure will depend on interest and your participation in this discussion. If you know something, anything about Plugins that hasn’t been discussed then this is the place to share it. It doesn’t matter how big or small, any insight beyond the wiki and docs is a plus.

The docs are here…

and the Wiki is here.

To get things started, I’ll share an expereience I had with plugins. I was trying to install the plugin here.

I created a myProject/Plugins directory and dropped it in there, but during compile I got a plethora of errors. Later I tried dropping it in UnrealEngine/Engine/Plugins and it worked fine. Later I was able to get it to compile as a game plugin by editing the PluginCreatorPrivatePCH.h file but I’m not sure as to why I need to do that?

I can only speculate that there are precompiled headers implicitly added to Engine Plugins that Game Plugins need to include explicitly? Tho, I can’t verify that is the case. If I’m correct this isn’t a trivial insight, it affects how plugins themselves are made. As plugin developers knowing this is important.

One thing I found, was that you need to edit the .cs files to include the modules from the engine that you need. So it might have been in your case you were using an engine module but hadn’t edited the dependencies in the .cs files to reflect that.

Here are a few related topics I’ve been working on, on the AnswerHub.

Including and Linking Shared/Static Modules

Including and Linking External Shared/Static Libraries

I think it would be nice and beneficial to have a tutorial on how to have plugin with GUI.

Those are coming with 4.8, not a tutorial but a wizard for making them.