Older engine versions are missing dependency sources

So I am trying to build an older version of the engine. 4.0 specifically, Mainly for education and for the much faster build times. (Also a source built version of 4.0 sits around 12GB versus the several hundreds of GB required for newer versions.)

Now I can compile this version of the engine using Visual Studio 2013 and using the prebuilt libraries provided as part of the setup instructions. Now obviously this isn’t ideal, I want to move to a newer compiler version but the major roadblock is that the prebuilt libraries do not provide any source code so they cannot be recompiled.

So the question is does Epic provide a way to get these dependencies source code so they can be rebuilt locally? And if not why?

This problem affects all versions of the engine. Relying on prebuilt .dlls/.libs forces all versions of the engine to be stuck in the past. Also begs the question as to what happens if these .zip files disappear one day/get taken down by Epic it means you will never be able to build the older versions of the engine again. (Unless you find a backup of the prebuilt libs again)

Just in case anyone ever comes across this, I managed to resolve this issue. You can build most of the libraries required locally however they are scattered everywhere. Some of the libraries you will have to just find old hosted versions online as they aren’t included in any of the UE4 versions. Others you can just pull the source from later versions of UE4 builds as it looks as if the devs finally added them. Some of the libraries are completely closed source meaning you will only be able to pull binary versions of them. (Why Epic, never gave any instructions on how to get these…)

In case anyone is considering doing this, I would put a warning forward that this is an extremely tedious process and there is very little upside unless you plan on maintaining your own UE4 version or plan on upgrading the libraries to newer versions etc.

I had to manually build my own build process for doing a full rebuild of the libraries which included adding in additional steps to copy various .dlls to the correct places. Also to note doing a full rebuild of the engine tooling is usually required which has additional steps. Me personally I’m not sure why they ever included built RPCUtility.exe as a binary instead of just making it build as part of GenerateProjectFiles.bat, so personally I have a script that automatically builds the required tooling, to generate the solution files.

I would highly recommend anyone attempting to do this level of a build to download the Windows Tools debugger and turn on Show loader snaps. This allows for the Visual studio Debugger to report the exact .dll’s it is looking for when starting the engine/game project etc.

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