Hello,
I advanced a lot in the development of my game recently, and I begin thinking of the launcher part.
My game is intended to be fully moddable through Lua and Content paks.
I would like the end user to be able to run and update the game the easy way with a launcher. I also need this launcher to expose a function to manage modding environments (assuming user has downloaded from unrealengine.com the entire Engine the same version of the game), downloading Game files and binarries from the public GitHub repo and automatically installing them in a defined location also setting up a .uproject for the launcher to open correctly.
I saw that EpicGamesLauncher seam to use a minimal version of the engine with Slate enabled. I tried to do the same : I prepared an empty folder, prepared a Target.cs and a Build.cs, basing myself on UnrealFrontend and SlateViewer code. After about 1 and half hours I arrived to generate a VS project (but I needed to create a fake .uproject otherwise UBT refused to detect any Target and Build.cs). I coded a LauncherMain.cpp and a LauncherMain.h still following the way UnrealFrontend works, however no ways to compile. Compilation inside VS instantly fails because UBT cannot find my Target.cs and Build.cs inside UE4Rules.dll which is normal as I have my own module rules assembly for that made using UBT and a fake .uproject. After another hour and half of searching in the github, I found that UBT is highly hardcoded to reject any path that is not Engine/Source when TargetType.Program is selected in the Target.cs. But I found an adjacent code in it used to make in Editor compile working, so I gave it my fake .uproject and it finally accepted to read my module assembly.
After about 10 more minutes I arrived to fix the LaunchEngineLoop.cpp file needed to be included in order to compile correctly (I needed to use an absolute path to the engine in the Build.cs). After another test it finaly compiled, but now it does not link !!
Indeed after near impossible compilation Linker starts failing, the Linker complains that a file called PCLaunch.rc.res does not exist (which is right, it does exist in engine Intermediate folder but not in my project’s Intermediate folder). I tried to copy the one of the engine in my folder but without any success, as it complains now that a file called HACD.lib (in Win32 compile, in Win64 it complains of HACD_64.lib) does not exist, I don’t know what is that lib neither what it does…
Am I doing anything wrong ? Or is it because what I’m trying to do is not supported currently ?
And if it’s not supported currently are there any plans to support it ?
Of course I can go with SDL library or even use my own abstraction layer but using UE4 libs could save me some time (even if I lost a lot now).
Please, can anyone help me after about an entire afternoon spent on this ?
Thanks by advance,
Yuri6037