Does it matter if I pressed right click on the engine’s main file and chose clean and build, versus pressing on the tab of the visual studio window itself that is named ‘Build’ and chose to ‘clean solution’, and ‘build solution’.
Because the behavior is different apparently between the two.
And which one to choose if I just GitHub-downloaded the engine and didn’t yet edit its code at all?
I’ll only speak for source build and what I do.
First always mark your starting project by right clicking on it in the solution explorer. For me I often right click the project and select build to be specific.
For source build make sure to build the engine first. Inside visual studio I right click UE5 and select build. You can use Rebuild instead if you also want to clean.
Once the engine is built and you can run it to create project etc, for your project again mark your project as the starting project by right clicking on it.
Whenever I need to build my project I can do it 2 ways, either right click my project name (solution explorer) and select build/rebuild or use the build menu option and select build only my project.