Background
I’ve been experimenting with UE5 for a few weeks, I came from Unity and have a broad, but not particularly deep, programming and physics background. I’m a hobbyist who wants to write a multiplayer game, there is no particular time scale to this and no commercial constraints, it’s just for fun.
Question
The Lyra framework appears to offer the perfect modular system for what I want to do, but I have several reservations about using it:
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I see it was released about 6 months ago, but I don’t see much updated documentation, roadmap or evidence it will be long term supported. In Unity it was common for very cool tech demo projects to be released and then rapidly die with no support for newer versions, after a couple of these I avoided them at all costs. I am now very wary of investing a lot of time in learning a framework that is forgotten in the next 12 months. What can I expect from Epic?
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What is the update strategy? I see I should be writing my game in a plugin that can use Lyra functionality, but how does that work in practice?
Examples:
a) Say I want to extend the animation system, do I duplicate all of the Lyra base animations into my game plugin and modify them there or do I somehow keep my changes separate, but build on the base Lyra animations?
b) If significant changes are made to Lyra, will I be able to selectively incorporate them? Will changes remain predominantly backward compatible and add functionality or should I expect significant rework? -
I don’t see any version controlled release mechanism or a system to allow for community content (e.g. forks)
So the real question is, for a newbie like me, arriving at a time of some flux for Lyra, should I invest the time in understanding Lyra (and it seems like that is quite a time commitment for me) or should I go for a more conventional approach of solving problems and plugging them together myself? I appreciate that the biggest concerns could only really be addressed by someone within Epic and this is unlikely to happen, but I would be interested in the opinions of the more experienced UE users.