It sounds as though we need to modify the engine in order to have any mod tools for our game. Is there any tool or plugin the the making that would make this easier?
You shouldn’t have to modify the engine really at all. We are working on a quick start and best practices guide and should have more info on that soon.
Awesome, that’s what I wanted to know.
It’s on the list, along with other resources specifically for this 
My concern with making a UE4 game moddable are the EULA restrictions on redistributing the editor and things that link against the editor modules. Like with ARK it’s more complicated than it should be, you have to download the tools on Steam (fair enough) but then you have to clone a GitHub repository and then copy that over to where you installed the tools.
Getting started with modding should be a lot easier than that.
We recognize that there are a number of obstacles that we need to overcome to make the workflow great for. Feedback like this definitely helps in that process!
However, the entirety of the mod tools could be uploaded to the GitHub repository if you choose, causing your players to go only one place to get them
Distributing an uncooked game alongside the tools through GitHub isn’t really feasible until Git LFS is generally available and even then it’s not as convenient as clicking a couple of buttons in Steam or the Epic Launcher.
Yeah, we’re aware that the workflow has a bit of room for improvement, so thanks again for the feedback. I’m sure you’ll see iterative enhancements as we move forward.
I’ll keep you posted
Question for you - Can we use C++ Assets from the marketplace and ship them with our Mod tools?
Or will that be on a per Marketplace vendor basis?
Integrating Steam’s workshop would be a nice feature. Seems like the ARK team have found a quite good solution for modding. Would love to see something similar out of the box from unreal engine.
I’m not sure about this modding stuff… It might be feasible for a “big” team of developers like ARK has (I call big everything > 5), but for someone who is creating a game alone or in a very small team I don’t think this is the type of modding I want to see officially supported by Epic. Small teams might only use blueprints etc, and I don’t think it will be ever possible to create a customized version of the UE4 editor just with blueprints. And then the second important thing is, I definitely don’t want the players of my game to need to know what UE4 is and how to use the UE4 editor. That’s really low level modding, while I would like to see possibilities for high level modding. This means having easy access to an ingame map editor and the ability to distribute these maps easy to other users (copy one file). I don’t know what you think, but if I play a game I don’t want to use the same editor the developers of the game use just to create a custom map. Learning how to create a custom map should not take longer than 10 minutes for the player. So clicking on a “map editor” button in the game, seeing 5 buttons for modifying the landscape, then being able to place some trees, create rivers etc (and all in “realtime” while the “game” runs) and then hit a save button, leave the map editor, and hit play and start playing the game in the custom map. That’s the type of modding most players want to do. And thats what UE4 should support.
Creating custom versions of the UE4 editor is good for big teams who have the resources to create heavy c++ customization to the editor and for being used by players who basically are themselves game developers and want to heavily customize the game. But that’s not 95% of the players who bought the game.
Could developers just release both the cooked and compiled versions on steam (but compresed , so it doesnt takes twice the space) , so modders could use the vanilla ue4 version and release the mods as dlc pak files?
Most nodding i have done is for Rfactor. The only way, would think of to make my game moddable. Would be to have your base game cooked. And have it pointing to external files which have the maps file, character file and weapons file. Then you would have the mod editor to convert the meshes, characters and weapons to ue file and place them in the directories. then if you do it that way the first person to mod your game would be you and that would be the template for other modders.
We here at will be making “Police 1013” moddable. Its a direction we’ve always expected to take as it gives our community the to add to the experience as they see fit. We’re watching how ARK are doing it and looking at ways to do it the same or better.
Def would like to learn more about this when you guys are ready for us
Thanks Epic
very interesting, also for small teams, as it would maybe make it posible to release a dev kit type thing which could also get more memebers/people to helpout but without committing
at least thats my plan for UT40k
I’m looking forward to seeing the best practices guide. I really hope we can provide support for modding in our burglary sim “Klepto”. I’d love to see players try and recreate their own neighborhoods into the game or bring in replicas of their own houses.
Lol, robbing your own house. I wonder if there would be more out of the box support with bsp.
I have a new shiny App ID and am about to set up Steam Workshop.
I’ve set up modding for a UE3 title before and it was an absolute nightmare. Would love some good documentation this time around. Would love to start testing this asap.
Sorry, but I think your are as wrong as you can get. First of all, an ingame modding tool is something that is up to you to create. There can’t be a good, generalized solution for this, since games are so vastly different. Also, History has shown that a lot of Games that flurished with Modding, like Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Starcraft 2, Half-Life (Source in General) all provide the same tools, the devs used internally to make their games. This is what is important to Modding Communities: Give them as much power as possible. Your approach would just limit you community, while you should be empowering your community. Having a great Editor, like UE4, with a powerfull visual scripting solution like Blueprints, will allow your community to basically use the full power of the engine, without having to code. This is also somthing, grat moddable games like Warcraft 3 did. They had a visual Scripting component, which allowed people to do crazy stuff, like creating whole new games like DotA