Installation on non-imaged systems

Hi,
I’ve seen the Academic Installation guide on the wiki here:

We’re planning to incorporate UE4 into our curriculum next academic year but I wanted to ask, will completing one installation in the standard manner and then following the “Updating the Engine and Content” instructions likely work for a fresh installation?
Our Windows 7 machines aren’t imaged and aren’t being rebuilt this year but if it was possible to copy specific directories, or to install the Epic Games Launcher on each and then add content over the top of this installation we could probably get by with this.

It’s not going to be feasible to download the content on every machine so I hoped there was an easier way!

Same question put in a different way (I suppose); is it possible to copy an email authorised installation the the Epic Games Launcher to another machine somehow, and is this the approved approach for academic institutions (we naturally don’t want to contradict the EULA!)?

Thanks,

Chris.

Hi Chris,

A few questions for you to help figure out the right solution for your school.

  1. Will students be creating their own Epic accounts on unrealengine.com or use a shared login?
  2. Is the content you are looking to share on multiple machines paid content form our marketplace or free content form our Learn section?

Hi, thanks for getting back to me. We’ll do whatever you advise as we are breaking new ground and therefore need to create the workflow as we go along.

In response to your questions:

  1. Students could set up their own Epic accounts if necessary. I had envisaged us having to ask our IT team to install the Epic Games Launcher remotely (the .msi hopefully allows for a silent install?) and then to manually go round logging in with a single college account to install the engine and assignment project onto each machine (ShooterGame with specific Sound Cues modified). I’ve now seen the Offline option, this might work thereafter as students don’t need to download any additional content / engines but could still access existing content if their personal account can see content installed to another account.
  2. The content is literally just the modified ShooterGame, although I would like to make the unadulterated version downloaded from the Learn section available so they could create a vanilla version for themselves if they wish.

We’re looking to deploy to approx. 40 machines so I’d like to avoid downloading the entire engine x40 if possible.

Thanks,
Chris.

If there is any assistance on this it would be appreciated as I’d like to be able to pass on any advice to our IT team, about the correct procedure before they being attempting to work out their own way.

Chris.

Hi Chris,

It sounds like you would be fine to have IT install the launcher with silent install on the machines. Instructions below.

The following msi flags will now work as expected:
/qn - Completely silent installation.

Sample install(Needs to be run from the cmdline):
msiexec /i EpicGamesLauncherInstaller.msi /qn
(NO UI. Needs to be run elevated or as Admin. Will NOT perform UAC prompt which is an artifact of windows installers /qn flag)

From there IT could download the engine and shooter game content once and copy that engine and content to the other machines using the “Updating the Engine and Content” section of the Academic installation instructions.

If students use offline mode you should be good to go.

If you want to include a vanilla shooter game:

  1. Download shooter game once and make the modifications saving as a separate project then have IT copy the engine and content to other machines.
  2. Students should still have the base shooter game in their Library->Vault section they could create a fresh vanilla project form if they so choose.

Hi cj.allen321,

We haven’t heard back from you in a few days, so we are marking this post as Resolved for tracking purposes. If you’re still experiencing this issue, please try the suggestion that Adam mentioned above. Then post back here with the requested info.

Cheers,

TJ