I’ve altered a plugin that comes with Unreal, but how do I recompile it to get UE to use it? I tried compiling any project thinking that might pick it up but it didnt. Do I have to recompile the whole engine?
Double-check you’ve renamed absolutely everything that needs to be renamed. Also, run the plugin creator from inside the editor at least once so you see where everything should go. Also make sure that you duplicated the plugin in the windows file explorer and NOT in the VS solution explorer, because all that does is create copies next to each other and they try to add themselves to the original plugin.
If your plugin is still residing inside the engine then you may have to recompile the engine. If you’ve taken a copy of an engine plugin and moved it to your project, then the UBT will try to recompile it when the editor loads if everything is set up right. If you copied the engine plugin just to get the plugin scaffold, definitely use the plugin creator instead. In fact, do this anyway and just steal the parts you want.
All the plugin tutorials are way out of date and cannot be trusted in the slightest.
A regular (newly created) plugin works just fine, but in this case I’m just changing a few things in the Substance plugin (something like /Engine/Plugins/Marketplace/Substance) and am trying to recompile that. I made the assumption that because the source was there (not just headers), it was recompiled, but perhaps that is the wrong assumption.
In any case my question still stands - can I recompile just this plugin, or does it require me to branch the Engine?
It should recompile automatically when you compile your game. Branching is not needed.
SolutionExplorer:
Rightclick UE4->Build
Or
Rightclick MyProject->Build
I had to delete the Intermediate and Binaries folder from the Substance directory to get it to recompile. I’ve had to do that before so that makes sense.