Request to provide core content (especially skeletons and IK retargeters) as a standalone plugin, and to update CitySample and Lyra to use those plugins

I’m working on my own project, and while I’m not using Lyra as a base project, I’ve been interested in re-using some components from it, for two primary purposes:

  1. As a starter point, to provide some stub / temporary filler content for specific assets. (EG: generic animations/sounds/materials, to help flesh out the project until I have time to make my own assets or hire a contractor to make custom assets to replace them)
  2. To use common base components, including common skeletons, IK retargeter assets, and base materials. With the only intention of maintaining, as much as possible, compatibility with assets from the Epic Marketplace, including Metahumans, as well as third party content, under the assumption that other indie developers will be using these same assets as a reference point for core unreal engine compatability.

The problem I’ve been running into lately is that, for the LyraStarterGame, both of these categories of assets are included as part of the core Content directory. This means that I have to manually extract the content I want to re-use or reference, into their own standalone plugin directory, if I want to be able to include them in my own project without pulling in dependencies for the entire LyraStarterGame project.

I’m fine with doing this as a one-time pass, and this works well enough for the content where I’m just trying to get temporary assets that I’m going to replace, but this is a much larger problem for the case where I’m explicitly pulling assets from the LyraStarterGame project because I want to maintain compatibility with the UE5 Manny and Metahuman skeleton system. Every time the LyraStarterGame is patched, which could be (and as far as I can tell, has been) as often as daily, I would need to redo the process of manually extracting, removing dependencies, and creating custom plugins to contain the parts of the Lyra game that I’m trying to reference.

This is an even bigger problem right now due to the opaque nature of updates, where the only way to update an existing project is to download an update from the epic game store and recreate a new project, without any indication of if the stuff I’m using changed.

My request is, if it all possible, for the Epic Games Team to move some of this “standard” content, especially core animation skeletons for Manny/Quinn/Metahumans, IK Retargeters, and possible base Material Shaders, to a separate UE store asset as its own plugin, and then to update the CitySample and Lyra projects to use them directly.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to build a project that uses some of these assets, and be able to have some degree of confidence that I should be able to package my project up, drop it as a plugin into the CitySample game, and have my own custom game logic running within the CitySample world, in a method that won’t require me to fork the CitySample project or otherwise need to redo a ton of work every time the CitySample marketplace project is updated