Rules about dependencies and including other people's work

We are building a system for our game that we plan on possibly selling in the marketplace. It’s going to be a base for multiple games we plan on making.

We have one base module that we would like to release standalone, and possibly free. This is like a general purpose utility module that we base all of our other games on. It contains a ton of useful extensions on top of Unreal Engine 4 that can be used in any game.

We also have another module that we depends on the base module. This one is a character and weapon system that includes all the work that would go into building either an FPS or TPS or VR game where you control a character that can equip weapons and manage inventory and other such things. Can we distribute this second market place asset and have it depend on the first asset? Or should we just include the first asset with this second asset in the market place?

We ended up using animations from the free Advanced Locomotion System V4 but only the animation assets themselves, retargeted to our version of the unreal skeleton. All the blueprints and everything are built from the ground up on our own. Is this allowed as long as we get permission from the creator of ALS V4? Or is it better to just replace them with some kind of placeholder and direct people to bring over assets from ALS V4 if they want, or replace with their own?

We also have another module we plan on including with the above described game pack that depends on another paid market place asset not made by us. This is completely optional and everything functions without it. This module would depend on our game module and the other person’s module. The final game could depend on this extra module and get additional functionality as long as people pay for this other module. Are we allowed to include optional things like this with our marketplace asset? Or can we just provide a link to this on our website for people to download, so if they bought our asset, and this other person’s asset, they gain this extra functionality? Or should we just keep this for ourselves if it’s not allowed?

TL;DR Are we allowed to have:

Market Place Asset X (Paid, not made by us)

Market Place Asset A (Free)
Market Place Asset B (Paid)

  • Depends on Market Place Asset A
  • Includes retargeted animations from another free market place asset not by us
  • Includes an optional submodule that depends on Market Place Asset X not made by us

V4 is actually free. https://www.unrealengine.com/marketp…tion-system-v1

From what I understand he kinda decided to just drop this version on us all for free and he’s focusing on other things since making such a general purpose thing is a lot of work. But I haven’t actually even discussed any of this with the creator of this yet before I even know if this is allowed.

We did start making our own animations but it’s a ton of work and were thinking about continuing to use these perfectly good ones if possible.

Honestly you’ll want to reach out to marketplace-support@unrealengine.com over this as none of us can answer definitively when it comes to this. Better to be safe going into your submission and knowing what is and isn’t allowed. Good luck. =)

Ah OK, guess I better ask there then.