Any news when we’ll be getting the opportunity to create/import mods to the UE4?
Loving the UE4 work that you guys are putting in. 
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I’ve been meaning to do a write-up post discussing how this will be done, as currently we don’t have any tools to give you folks to create your own mods.
The main issue is with the licenses that Epic Games has for UE4. Basically, we aren’t allowed to distribute UE4 code, so we can’t give you beautiful modders the source files you’d need to create your own Automation content.
The ‘best’ option would be to put together some tools ourselves that you can then put in to a default UE4 build and create assets with, but that’s a lot of extra work, and a lot of Automation source assets we’d have to give out at the moment (I just did a test export of the assets you’d need to make a fixture, and it’s like ~150Mb and ~200 files). I’m going to try and discuss this with Andrew and Cas when they get back and see what can be done with that.
Right now, I’m leaning towards asking very politely for the source .fbx files so I can bring them in myself, but there are So Many other things I need to do before I can have time to work on that.
tl;dr - We’re still discussing the best ways to do this.
Soon™
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So… It might actually be entirely possible that UE4 will not have modding support? or will you guys get it in there one way or another?
Entirely possible: yes, likely: no. Modding is too important for Automation to not make this work somehow.
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UE4 is free software, so is it possible that the worst case is having to download UE4 and opening some kind of Automation file in there to add mods to the game?
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Worst case, yes.
Best case: we get added to the Epic Games launcher(?) and you download our custom ‘modding’ version of UE4 for Automation, and use that to author your mods.
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Did a quick test of skinning a car model in Blender. Seems easy enough. Since Blender can export to fbx, that would mean that I might be finally able to make mods at some point, if the only thing you’d need is the Unreal editor and not some kind of exporter plugin that only works on a specific version of 3dsmax. Here’s hoping.
I don’t know if it applies to your particular situation, but I know XCOM2 (Which was Unreal Engine) had a little modding section where “just their stuff” could be manupulated, separate from the game. Could that help?
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The issue is, we cannot distribute the Editor outside of official Epic Channels.
As @Fleshy stated, ideally we get added to the Epic Launcher, but I doubt that will happen. We ain’t Ark.
Instead we are allowed to fork the UE Github repo, make our changes. Add a cut down Game Content package. (Containing all our tools, materials, etc. But isn’t the actual game).
We just have to make the time somewhere to do this. As it is going to take quite a while to sort out.
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Well, the good news is, you’ve already demonstrated yourselves to be upstanding developers to the community, so I’m sure none of us will have any issue waiting patiently (And while I can’t speak for the others, I know I’d be AOK with paying a little more to you all to help fund development of the modding scene).