I’m sorry if I missed the thread on this, but I’m working on a code plugin for unreal and am having some trouble. I want to share the plugin with technical artist as a binary distribution. I’m working in VS 2013, Unreal 4.8.1. I’ve followed the tutorials and setup instructions for this and have had no problems building/running unreal. I added my plugin per the tutorials and instructions in the unreal docs. My plugin works fine on my machine when I launch from within VS, but if I move the plugin folder with binary directories (as described in the tutorials) to a release version of unreal on my machine or other machines, I get an error during launch that says my plugin isn’t compatible with this version of unreal, etc. even though it’s also 4.8.1.
I’ve seen a few related thread with significant steps/hurdles required to get around this, but it seems like I must be missing something obvious. Any help and clear steps would be much appreciated.
Are you using source or launcher build to create your plugin?
Source builds most likely will have different version than launcher. To check it, open Unreal Editor on your machine and from top menu go to Help->About and compare your UE version with the one on other machine.
If that’s the case, then you will have to:
Download Launcher build on your machine
Create Code project using launcher build (call it MyProject for example)
Put your plugin in MyProject/Plugins dir
Generate project files
Build project from VS
Dll’s should be created now and you should be able to share them with other people. Note that you need to share only Binaries folder and .uplugin file. Source folder should not be required.
Thanks for the reply. When I check the unreal editor that’s built on VS it reads: Version: 4.8.1-0+++depot+UE4-Releases+4.8. When I check the installed version on my machine or others it reads: Version: 4.8.1-2591939+++depot+UE4-Releases+4.8. Is this helpful in the diagnostic?
Where do I acquire the launcher build? I forked the unreal engine release branch, cloned that to my desktop and have been developing my plugin in the development editor.
In case it’s helpful, the full text of the error I get when going from the production launcher is “Plugin ‘xyz’ failed to load because module ‘xyz’ does not appear to be compatible with the current version of the engine. The plugin may need to be recompiled.”
Launcher build is the engine downloaded and installed via Launcher, not the engine forked from git. For some reason engine from release branch and the one that you can get from launcher has different versons. So, yeah, you have to do what I said previously.