So I think the deal is, I had perforce installed, and just the other day I updated windows to 24H2, which totally broke perforce. so I had to uninstall it, but it had every file in my main project set as read-only.
it’s weird cuz I wasn’t using version control with the plugin project, and even though I unchecked read-only for everything in that project, I suppose perforce also got something in the unreal engine folder as read-only.
so I uninstalled everything, UE 5.4, 5.5, epic launcher, visual studio, and then installed everything again. VS is a PITA so I followed these tutorials:
hit a brick wall since there’s no Visual studio integration tools for UE 5.5 yet, but then searching online people said you don’t really need that, so I went ahead with everything fresh, and it compiled somehow.
can’t pin point what exactly was causing the error, but it works now.
thanks again for helping out every time something comes up!