Request - Plugin Dependencies

General Feedback & Requests
1

It would be nice if we had the ability to have plugin dependencies that aren’t strictly what gets shipped with Unreal Engine. Kind of like how you need the base game before buying DLC.

The reason for this is that I have a paid plugin and would like to extract some of the functionality into a free plugin but still use this functionality. Of course I could just copy and paste the code into the separate plugin but I would like a greater level of separation of concerns and reduce potential code overlap. There’s no point having several implementations of the exact same functionality. Each one needing to get compiled.

So in this situation, if people didn’t want the paid plugin but liked the functionality in the dependant plugin, they can just get the dependant plugin.

I don’t know if this would be good but it would lead to a situation where people could create functionality based on other plugins, meaning people could extend other plugins. To counter this, you could add a condition where all the plugins have to be published by the same person.

Just a thought.

Edit: I’m talking about code plugins specifically, not sure how it would work with other types.

2

Hello,

Thanks for the feedback.

So is the idea that you would list one code plugin for free with more limited functionality, and then list a more advanced paid plugin that requires the free plugin to run?

3

Yeah, to give a more concrete example.

I’m currently redoing a grid based navigation plugin. One step is to voxelise the level within a bounds.

I would like to put the voxelisation tools into their own free plugin because I think they would be useful to others for use outside my use case but my plugin would still need this free plugin to be able to voxelise the level.

Alternatively, if the free plugin is not on FAB, maybe a way to automatically pull the plugin from a public GitHub repository. A window could pop up in UE5 when enabling the paid plugin that says “this plugin depends on an external plugin available here (link), download plugin?” or something like that.