Ah, I’ve fixed the link, some weird junk happened with the OP during one of my edits. It’s on the UE4 Development Trello Roadmap to have some kind of activity on native-supported volumetric light/fog in July, whether that means it’s going to be finished or started or iterated on or what, I don’t know.
My system allows users to have a feature-complete volumetric lighting system sooner if they wish, as it’s ultimately unclear what the July label on the trello means, ie it could be iteration, completion, or even the start of attempts at creating it. I asked one of the devs during a live stream if it’ll be in 4.13, and he hadn’t heard any updates on it, so I’m honestly not sure when it’ll be making it’s way into the release version of the engine.
My system contains some features like fog-patterns, procedural dust placement, (fog patterns/dust won’t be there on release day, will be in first update soon after) and sun-actor-based color assignment, and is guaranteed to work with spotlights, directional lights, and point lights out of the box. Someone else had tried creating a plugin to have volumetric lighting as a spotlight feature, but ultimately abandoned work on it and never made it work with point lights or directional lights.
I worked hard on this system and wanted to release it for free initially, though the marketplace currently doesn’t allow for free assets to be uploaded by non-Epic staff except for very special cases, so I chose the lowest price point and decided to sell it, even if it may be available in the coming months by default, but I didn’t want to put the system on the marketplace and have people buy it and then have Epic include their own version as a feature and have people get upset that they could have saved their money, so I wanted to let people know that they can wait and save their money if they want to. I also wanted to have it on a platform where I could track analytics like unique downloads, overall ease of use, etc, hence why I wanted it on the marketplace. I could have released it for free and hosted it on my dropbox or something but that wouldn’t have offered me the same statistics, as I’m trying to build a professional portfolio, and those kinds of stats would help me greatly.
TL;DR I worked very hard on it and near completion I found out it’s going to be in the engine at some point but I still want to try and distribute it to show my work in a portfolio but I didn’t want it to look like I’m trying to scam people by trying to sell them something they could avoid spending money on if they chose to wait.