Plugin development causes the engine to rebuild sometimes

I try to develop a plugin with custom actor components for my game. I packed them into a plugin in case I want to reuse it for other projects. So when I make a change in the sourcecode of the plugin, I build the game project, which includes the building of the plugin library. Unfortunately this change isn’t always taken over to the UE editor, even when I use the editor compile button or Modules->[plugin name]->Recompile. The only thing that helps in this case is to restart the editor. Then I get a message that the game and the plugin libraries are built with a different engine version and must be rebuilt, which I do and everything works fine. But sometimes not only the game and the plugin are rebuilt, but the whole engine. This is really annoying because it takes too much time for me.

I use 4.14.3 and VS Express 2015. I’m not very familiar with the UE building process, so I would be happy for any advice.

I work almost entirely in plugins and I’ve not seen this behavior, personally. However, I never keep the UE editor up while I’m writing code. Hot Reload has always been black magic to me and I don’t trust it. :slight_smile: You might want to try just launching using only VS while working on code and see if that prevents the rebuild (you can even use UE VS to set the start up project to whatever project you’re working on).

While the 1st editor launch is slow, subsequent ones should be fairly fast since everything is cached at that point.

I have seen this a few times last year in a custom build of the engine; but I wasn’t the one who built the engine from source so I didn’t make questions about it.

Thanks for your advice! So when I re-launch the editor through VS each time after I’ve changed some code in my plugins this is perfectly loaded with the editor. But unfortunately I would prefer a solution where I can leave the editor open, because I like to test my components frequently in the editor during the development.

But I noticed that when I re-launch the editor VS requests following projects to be built because they are out of date even when I havn’t changed anything:

ShaderCompileWorker - Development_Program x64
[MyGame] - Development_Editor x64

Is this normal or have I messed something up?

And unfortunately I cannot use the UE VS extension, because it doesn’t work with the express versions :frowning:

Is there a reason why you aren’t using VS2015/VS2017 Community Edition? It’s free and supports the UE VS extensions.

And yes, VS will always complain those particular projects are out of date, but it doesn’t actually rebuild them unless something changes.

I use the Express version because I’ve had it already installed and was too lazy to switch :wink: Also, I quickly looked into the source code of UE VS and saw that it just calls BuildProject on the selected start up project. So I should get the same effect if I just manually build the game project, right? But this is what I already do :frowning:

Switch. You’re using a very gimped version of VS2015.

It does call Build Project but it is also lets you pass around command line arguments easily without having to alter project configs.

Well I am experiencing the same issue. AFTER adding a plugin to the game code… Everytime I hit Project Only->Rebuild it rebuilds the entire engine. Seems like this is a bug with Unreal or VS not being able to track dependencies accurately.