Engine Plugins binary distribution

Development Pipeline & Plugins Plugins
,
1

Hello everybody,

Does anyone know if there is a preferred or any way to pre-build an engine plugin so it is compatible with the Unreal Launcher and does not have to be rebuilt by the users? This would allow users that used the Installed engine to use the engine plugin.

The actual problem, it seems, is that the Git Hub release commit (in my case the 4.6.1 tag) does not match the one that is used to build the engine in the launcher.

What I did was:

  • Built the engine plugin in all configurations allowed by the editor
  • Installed the latest 4.6.1 Engine from the Launcher
  • Installed the plugin in Engine/Plugins of the Installed engine
  • Ran the engine and enabled the plugin in a project (restart was required)
  • During the restart, while the engine was loading, I got the versions does not match error, do you want to compile it (compilation does not work since there is no engine source)

I have found a very painful workaround that required moving the plugin to a game plugin in a project that uses the Installed engine, compiling it in all configurations, and then moving it back to the installed engine. This however is more like a workaround, rather than an actual solution.

2

To my knowledge, for ue4 at-least this is the only option viable.

I think no matter who compiled ue4 engine, it will always be a different version, even if nothing was changed.

(isnt ue4 designed for this functionality, if someone could confirm that’s be great m’kayy) nvm it’ because it’s binary code and the addresses of functions can change with a recompile