Because right click on the uproject and regenerating the Visual Studio files from there does not create the .sln file in 4.18.1 and this documentation is outdated: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Programming/UnrealBuildSystem/ProjectFileGenerator/ (because it no longer has that bat-file).
Hey there, make sure you’ve followed the steps to install Visual Studio 2017 with support for Unreal Engine 4 (Setting Up Visual Studio for Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine Documentation), you might be missing something !
Thanks. Apparently the SDK 8.1 was missing. Oddly enough UE4 closes the output window from generating the project files (so you do not see any errors). It contained an error about a missing SDK 8.1. Screenshotting/recording it is a must… Epic should really change that.
I installed the Windows SDK 8.1 separately from a file (not from the Visual Studio setup) and also the SDK 10.x apparently that doesn’t count for UE4 so I went to add/remove programs > Visual Studio 2017 and added the SDK 8.1 from there as shown in your link and now it generates.