Comment by doawoo
4 months ago
Yup.
Long long (2016 ish) ago I released an Unreal Engine 4 plugin that let people embed chromium embedded framework views into the engine via textures, so you could make fancy HUDs or whatever.
Epic Games was kind enough to give me a developer grant for open sourcing and making it, cool as hell for a college student at the time, helped pay my classes.
The number of angry game devs who basically wanted me to solve all their problems for them for free was astounding, additionally another dev grant receiver was jealous that I got money close to their grant for “just making a crappy plugin”
(paraphrasing but that was essentially what happened)
No one is ever thankful lol.
I don't know how different it is for other types of dev but, AFAICT, plugin development for game engines (Unity, Unreal, Godot?) is one of the absolute worst things. The issue is that millions of new developers are using them to build a game. They have no experience. If they run into any bug at all, while using your plugin, even if it's totally unrelated to your plugin, they'll ask for free support.
Say you made a plugin that serializes/deserializes to JSON. They making an FPS and the gun doesn't shoot in the correct direction. They'll ask why it's not working in your support area, even though it's got nothing to do with your plugin.
I always wonder about this. I use open source software but I'm never close / in proximity to the developers enough to say thanks.
The folks who are in proximity, folks with requests and complaints.
Hey! I used your plugin!!
It actually paid few bills in my case! Regards.
<3 Glad it was helpful!