I didn’t see any documentation other than this page Plugins in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.2 Documentation , which is very light. I’m not aware of what plugins can fully offer or how to interact with anything really. Maybe I want to build a cool tool for my artists, but I don’t know the extent of what I can do with plugins or how to use them. Is there more information?
If you want more information, your best bet is to just grab the Engine source and take a peek at the various plugins in Engine/Plugins. There aren’t a lot of restrictions IMO.
Also of note, I copied the Blank Plugin to my local project as well as editing the SpeedTree importer plugin. However when forcing compile errors, the compiler isn’t complaining. Is there a specific way to compile plugins?
Study builtin plugins such as Paper2D; you can learn a ton from them.
Also note that you don’t need to build them within the engine, it is equally valid to drop them into a C++ project and compiling the project will compile any plugins found under the {Project root}/Plugins folder that are enabled which I consider a faster workflow. I tend to do all my plugins that way and they’re all open source so feel free to take a peek there (links found in my sig).
As mentioned here before, you’re not really limited in building your plugins; you can import any engine module just as you can in C++ projects to base and expand from there or import your own external dll. Then you can simplify everything and expose convenience blueprint functions to the end developer or write editor workflow optimizations (e.g. custom tool windows). That said, if you’re looking to build workflow optimizations you may want to consider using 20tab’s awesome python plugin GitHub - 20tab/UnrealEnginePython: Embed Python in Unreal Engine 4 which allows you to script editor pipelines without needing recompilations/etc https://github.com/20tab/UnrealEngin…tedPipeline.md