I am having some problems with the way the UE Editor determines whether a project is the right version or not, including how it determines if the plugins are the right version or not. Essentially it says the versions are different even when they are exactly the same. I built my project and editor from source. I then copied the entire unreal directory to a new one, and ran that copy and then selected my project and the editor said it was a different version.
Being an exact copy I don’t see how it can be a different version, and this is really biting us due to the way we handle installations of the editor in house. We build the editor from source, and maintain one copy for developers to use and another copy is trimmed down and then made available for artists to install locally. We started having a problem where the artist versions were claiming to be different (even though they came from the exact same source), so I started looking into it and that was when I found that I could trigger the probelm simply by making a copy, without even pruning it down.
So the bottom line here is I am trying to understand what mechanism is used to determine if a given project matches a given editor runtime, and the same for plugins in the project.