If i use some plugin and if i build my game…does the whole plugin will get added to my shipped package or does the specified functionality i use will only get added to the shipped package?
If you use editor plugins ( like helpers ), you can disable the plugins when you ship.
If you use runtime plugins, you have to ship them with your game. Which is a major pain in the bum. Mainly because you should be able to make a shipping version WITHOUT Visual Studio, but you do need VS, just to write the target.cs file.
Maybe it’s possible to write target.cs manually, but I didn’t figure out how ( to be fair, I haven’t tried this with 5 yet ). As a blueprint dev, I didn’t really appreciate kissing goodbye to a wadge of drive space, to write a text file.
If your game is popular, the other problem is, as time goes on, you will have to patch it, and that means an up to date version of the plugin. If you are unlucky, the vendor isn’t making the plugin anymore for the current engine. And so on…
What ClockworkOcean says is true, but if you’re a c++ person, or are familiar with Visual Studio, having plugins isn’t painful at all - they just quietly build when you package your project.
It is good to choose plugins that are from people known to keep them updated, support all platforms you will want and are clearly documented and have easy to read and modify code.
There are things that plugins provide sometimes that make it all worth while.
The whole “runtime” plugin built code is distributed with your packaged project - typically it will be compiled into the exe and/or have .dll files (or .apk etc) in the same folder.
So, if the plugin is 98 Mb and if it is runtime plugin … u are saying my game size will be increased by 98 MB 
Yip 
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