Just backed with my Ultimate License upgrade. Very excited.
How difficult will it be to add our own VFX? I code by trade, have a lot of experience in After Effects/C4D, and I know my way around Unity. Will making new animation effects be as simple as loading a looping webm/mp4 or, more likely, a Unity animated texture into the appropriate folder with the right technical boxes checked, or will it have to be something more like a module or extension that makes exceptions in the client?
If this isn't in the cards, could you go into some detail as to why not and if it's something you can see coming into the product down the line? Would we have to pay for such a product?
When I asked along these lines in 2017, you said, "we will probably ship with some and provide more as available add-ons as time goes on," which sounds ominously like it's something we would have to pay for.
Along the same lines in 2018, when I asked if end users/modders could use animated texture from Unity on an ad hoc basis, you said, "We generally prefer to roll out features in a controlled fashion at first and then we eventually circle back to see if these are features that we can expand to user modifications and creations. This allows us to make any necessary changes for performance and to ensure that we are 100% satisfied with the underlying mechanisms after they've seen interaction with a larger user base."
These are fair, cautious answers. As someone who is dying to place customized moving water around a ship map, or fires dispersed throughout a cave, this is still the main question in my mind. You already have my money, and I'm confident I'll love FGU as much as I've loved the current software, but with FGU so close to release, can you provide a more substantive answer?