Greetings Epic and the Community,
I always wanted native mod support for unreal engine and I thought about that it shouldn’t be so hard to implement.
In the Engine
Are booleans if the game is allowed to search for mods.
If true there is a default mod directory in the root directory ( name can be adjusted by the engine ini ).
You may have for your project an encryption and decryption key that can be used by a modbuild tool that you need to compile from the engine source and insert the encrypt and decrypt key that you will be able to mount the pak’s addons file.
In the addon file there should be a information json struct like addon.json. This contains information about the addon like name, cover, description, engine version,creator and so on.
Developer can choose inside of the engine config what file types are allowed like Blueprints , Materials , Sounds, Maps and so on.
In the Editor
You can make with the “Mod Tool” that you got from the developer’s game build a mod with the content folder of the current or selected project. It will cook the content and creates the addon.json
Developer can implement by the blueprint functions:
Addons-> Search Level’s -> Return Array Names
And so on.
I hope you like my idea or something and you can do something like that that modders doesn’t need the game source.
I saw several threads about modding but it is not a clean method.
Cheers,
Bander