Differences Between GitHub and Unreal Download?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

I haven’t been able to find an answer to this question, and I’ve noticed some differences but I don’t know if I should use one Editor over another. To elaborate, the GitHub download gave me all the commands that I assume should be available “Debug, DebugGame, Development” each with secondary key words “empty, Editor, Server, and Client” there were also “Shipping” and “Test”.

Downloading the Launcher from the Unreal Engine website, when I installed via the launcher any projects I created only had access to “DebugGame, Development” with “empty” and “Editor” as well as “Shipping”. Also with the Launcher install, there were none of the batch files mentioned in any of the set up tutorials (GenerateProjectFiles.bat, and InstallVisualizers.bat).

While reading through the tutorials, several of them mentioned compiling using the Debug configuration (which was unavailable in the Launcher version). Is that a problem that the Launcher install lacked the batch files and Debug, as well as Server and Client keywords? Furthermore, if that is a problem, when I attempt to use the GitHub download, after building, attempting to debug it tells me I’m missing UE4Editor-Win64-Debug.exe will rebuilding fix that or did I miss something in either the Optional.zip or Source.zip?

It seems the GitHub download has more features (while I may not need them this instant, could be useful in the future). Also, the version I’ve been working with is 4.1, as well as Visual Studios 2013 Professional

2

The version of the engine that you download from the launcher has the engine precompiled into static libraries. That makes it a lot quicker to get up and running with game code and takes a lot less hard drive space, but we don’t include libraries for all the available build configurations (full debug, client, server and so on are missing).

The alternative to using the Debug configuration in launcher builds is to use the DebugGame configuration, which optimizes the engine but leaves you with debuggable game code. Most gameplay programmers at Epic use that, because the engine can be pretty slow when all the debug features are enabled.

If you want to build the debug editor using the GitHub distribution, pick ‘Debug Editor’ from the configuration in Visual Studio and Win64 as the platform.

We may include full source with the launcher installs in the future, to narrow the gap between the two distributions. Installing builds through the launcher allows us to give a much more streamlined experience.

3

Thank you very much, that helped a lot