Forking a experimental engine plugin and sharing it

I’ve been looking at the ScriptPlugin/ScriptGeneratorPlugin and I’m interested in forking it and maybe going down a different path than the original author. I know git users cannot share engine source publicly, but in the case of experimental engine plugins, are there any options for sharing modified plugin code? I believe I cannot restrict my code to the Epic organization on github, but I don’t want to keep my work to myself.

Is there anything for developers to work with in this regard?

Cross posted from here, wasn’t sure which venue was appropriate.

When you Fork the engine source code from Epic’s repository, your fork will be visible to all of the other UE4 subscribers but not to the general public. Any changes you submit to your own fork of the engine are easy to share with other community members – you can simply paste them a link to your repo, and they will be able to merge changes you’ve submitted.

–Mike

Unless I am mistaken, this means I can only have one repo in my account that I can share. If I wanted to have two repos with this kind of access, it is not possible?

Correct, that’s a GitHub limitation. However you could have multiple branches on your own copy of the repo, and using Git tools you should be able to branch any version of UE4 into any one of your own branches.

–Mike

So I could have a branch for each plugin instead of for each version? Isn’t ideal, but that is better than nothing at all!

I’m looking at the script generator plugin right now and a lot of the base work that has been done by Epic doesn’t really seem worth implementing differently just to get around license restrictions. I believe if I were to make a public repo that is a copy of the ScriptGeneratorPlugin folder, Epic’s lawyers would not take too kindly to that :slight_smile:

Yeah those guys can be trouble

Yes, that should be possible. I haven’t tried it though.

If you’re creating your own UE4 plugins that are not derivative of Epic’s, there is no reason you can’t release the source code in a public GitHub repository if you so choose. As long as you aren’t pasting Epic’s code in there, you own that plugin’s code and can do whatever you want with it. Each plugin can then have it’s own repository if that is most convenient for you.

–Mike