We haven’t heard the specific payments possible via the Unreal Marketplace nor licensing terms for plug-ins yet. [We’ll see if we can find out if Epic have some ideas yet.]
It does seem that the Epic terms allow us to offer our own payment and licensing mechanism through our own site if the Unreal Marketplace doesn’t meet our needs - like subscription. However we would much prefer to just go though the Unreal Marketplace if we can rather than setting up our own payment infrastructure.
Yeah, if I was in your position I would like to have it all handled via the already available system. Just hope they offer the stuff you want/need in order to do everything you want regarding payments of the plugin!
Keep up the good work and I’ll be right here when it is ready for testing! 
Even if Epic doesn’t make terms or payments in the way we need - worst case we should still be able to make the Standard (free) version available through the Unreal Marketplace. It is hard to put too many conditions on “free”. 
Also - Epic may not have the mechanisms we want day 1 though we can wait and work with them until they do and put paid for plug-ins in the Unreal Marketplace at a later point.
So how are things looking here? Making good progress?
If the lack of updates makes it seem that things are going dark it is only because we are living and breathing this plug-in. 
All going well - watching scripts running over time in the game via the Unreal editor and are able to make live changes and updates using the Skookum IDE and console window.
Now focusing on hooking up a sampling of each of the sort of features that provides.
The main thing that we are pressed for time on is making enough of an example “game” that can be used for tutorial purposes, creating more documentation and figuring out how best to package and distribute the plug-in code.
It won’t be of any use if all this cool stuff is available and there is no indication of what is present is or how to use it.
If time is on our side we will have closed Beta by the end of next week and open Beta sometime soon afterwards.
Sounds great. So pretty much on time.
This is some great news! I’m really looking forward to start trying it out! Glad to hear that things are working out fine for you as well!
How does Skookum handle UnrealEngines multiplayer features? Will it support replication and such from the engine or what is you take on that part?
I haven’t specifically looked into multiplayer features yet though there should be no reason why Skookum should not be able to support it. Skookum can be hooked into any Unreal C++ call and should get all the Blueprint calls from the start. This may include enough multiplayer functionality right away and if not it is easy to add any bindings to additional Unreal functionality that you might need to support multiplayer.
Skookum communicates with its IDE remotely and an ancestor language that it is based on was a distributed language where one program could run over several computers - all this stuff is similar to multiplayer. However sending scripts and behaviours remotely shouldn’t be necessary - Unreal should provide enough direct support for multiplayer that Skookum can hook into, direct and be event driven by.
Also the best proof is that is used to create the massively multiplayer Triad Wars so it should be able to do the same with Unreal as well.
Great fast answer (Even though I wasn’t able to answer until now), really looking forward to test it out! 
Is things going as planned? Don’t want to be a pain asking all the time, but I’m truly excited about starting to test it out asap!
I really hope this is coming along well… would love to hear a solid release date.
[Hey - didn’t get notified about the last 2 posts.]
We are now testing it internally, making tutorials and will be giving it out as a closed Beta in a few days to a few people.
Sorry about not giving a solid date for the open Beta. We want to ensure a decent initial experience - even for the Beta - and the learning curve for the massive Unreal Engine code base makes it challenging to estimate how long things will take.
We haven’t been posting much since who wants to hear - it’s coming - without more meat. Though really - it’s coming!
However - if anyone posts here asking questions or sends an email we will make sure to respond.
I’m ready throw Blueprints under the water for my mobile game (they are always getting corrupted on me!they are so fragile), so I hope you guys can get the beta out soon! so excited for this :). If you need a mobile tester, I would love to volunteer.
We definitely would like to have mobile games and you are the first to make the offer.
What platform(s) are you developing on?
The IDE currently is only on Windows PC though the runtime can work on any platform. While the IDE is not 100% necessary to develop a game it is very nice and you can still connect to any game on any platform remotely if you can run the Skookum IDE on a Windows PC.
We hope to have a Mac OS native Skookum command line compiler by the time the full Skookum plug-in is released.
We plan to make a Linux command line compiler for Skookum too - let us know if you are interested so we can adjust our priority accordingly.
We plan to make the full Skookum IDE native for other platforms down the road.
I am developing primarily for iOS at the moment, and I do all my work on a Windows machine (using the remote tool to compile to my punny macbook). As long as it can compile for iOS, I see no initial problems (though there will always be problems!), and would be glad to test it. I think a language like Skookum makes since for mobile development. A lot of mobile developers are making smaller games, and interested in more agile development scripting provides. I previously did some development with ‘Rubymotion’ a ruby interface to objective c, and it was great (as Objective C is the ugliest language ever created in my personal opinion besides Lisp).
I’m interested in this, but as long as UE4 is significantly less reliable on Linux, I’m going to be sticking with Windows anyway. So not a priority on my end unfortunately.
Perfect - that should work just fine then.
Skookum has some pretty unique syntax though it has a few things that look similar to Ruby. For example you can omit parentheses () on subroutine calls that take no arguments - do_stuff is the same as do_stuff(). Also data members start with @ and class data members start with @@ - as in obj.@data or MyClass.@@data.
I looked at many languages over the years to look for good ideas - and I can’t say that there was anything that I was influenced by in Objective-C.
Swift and have a number of greater similarities though Skookum is top-to-bottom made for games, more dynamic and concurrency and interactivity is a core part of the language.
The big push for Linux will likely come from Valve and Steam if anyone. If or when it does you can be sure that will have its IDE there too.
Again the Skookum runtime works fine on Linux and Skookum works great on consoles which are generally various flavours of Unix.
has anyone here been signed up to the closed beta or heard anything else about this plug-in? I’d just like to know how it’s going.