Engine Source Installation and Team Deployment Recommendation

Development Getting Started & Setup
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Hi ,

I’m sorry that we missed this post initially, you bring up quite a few good questions and I will try to address as many as I can. First, your initial post.

  1. Your initial setup looks fine, though it would be a good idea to reverse 1.3 and 1.4 - create your .uprojectdirs file before creating your project. On a side note, if you create a new folder in the root folder of your Engine installation into which you will create your project(s) (using your path as an example, C:\MyProject\Projects\MyGame and adding the line Projects to your .uprojectdirs file), the Editor will automatically include your game project in the Engine’s solution file (the game project will not have its own solution file) and you will not need to do step 1.5 whenever you create a new game project.
  2. As TimGS mentioned, you need to make sure to run UnrealVersionSelector-Win64-Shipping.exe (located in the ..\Engine\Binaries\Win64\ folder) after you have built the Engine. This registers your Engine with Windows and provides the three custom context menu options whenever you right-click on a .uproject file. If you have manually set the file association for your .uproject files, open the Properties panel for any .uproject file and make sure the “Opens With:” field contains a blue Unreal Engine icon and not a black one. If the icon is black, make sure you have run the UnrealVersionSelector executable I mentioned above and then right-click on the .uproject file and Switch Unreal Engine Version option and select the location where your Engine is located. Check the .uproject properties again to make sure you now have a blue icon. If it is still black, please let us know.
  3. The Launcher will not recognize your Engine that is built from source. It only works with binary versions of the Engine. Having said that, the Launcher is where the Marketplace is located. You will be able to download content from the Marketplace without having a binary version of the Engine installed. However, you will still need to convert the content to your source version of the Engine if you download a sample project, demo, or tutorial. The Launcher will prompt you several times to let you know that you do not have a binary version of the Engine installed, but you can complete the download after acknowledging the warnings. In regards to your 3.3 question, I will try to get some information about how to get around the installation failed message if it is still appearing for you.

To answer some of your additional questions that appeared in the thread…

If you want to be able to have customized versions of the Engine for each game project that your team works on, then you will need to have multiple installations of the Engine. This is not a problem, as long as you have the storage space available (my computer has around 800GB of Engines currently).

You do not need to have the Launcher installed in the same location where you have your Engine built from source code. It does not even need to be on the C: drive. I have the Launcher and all of my Engine installations on my D: drive (D:\UE4Launcher\ and D:\SourceBuilds\). Keep in mind that if you ever do install a binary version of the Engine, it will install in the same location where you have the Launcher installed (the option to specify a different installation location for a binary Engine installation may be available in the future).

Are you still having difficulty with the GUID issue?

I hope this helped with some of the questions that you (and other users, I am sure) had. Please let us know if you need any clarification on anything.