"plugin not compatible" message appears for plugins that ship without binaries

Development Pipeline & Plugins Plugins
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1

Hi,

if I pull the “BlankPlugin” into my project and open the project everything is fine. As soon as I delete the “Binaries” and “Intermediate” directories inside the Plugin, the following message appears:

Missing Plugin

This project requires the ‘BlankPlugin’ plugin, which is not compatible with the current engine version.
Would you like to disable it? You will no longer be able to open any assets created using it.

The background is, that we’re distributing a Plugin in source form via bitbucket without precompiled binaries. The Plugin is compatible with 4.15, 4.16 and 4.17. This message is confusing customers - and it’s pretty easy to push the wrong button here.

The message above started to appear with UE 4.17. This Question suggests to remove the plugin from the “Plugins” list of the .uproject file. But what’s the point of having a plugin that is not enabled for the project?

It would be great if someone could explain why UE thinks the plugin is not compatible. Currently I believe this is a bug in UE 4.17.

Thanks!

Edit: ulimately, we’d like to have “EnabledByDefault”:true in the .uplugin file as it is less work to integrate the plugin. but this leads to the same problem.

2

Hi thronerbe,

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner on this. I did some initial poking around on this when you first posted, but then got pulled off onto other tasks and only just got a to finish looking into this issue. It looks like this may have been some unintentional fallout from some changes to plugin functionality in 4.17. I have entered UE-49007 to have this investigated further.

3

Has this been resolved?

I recently tried to use the “RichTextBox” Plugin in my 4.19.1 project.

The link that I used to get the Plugin assured me that it was specifically packaged for 4.19.1. Thus, it can’t be due to an incompatible version.

I really need this Plugin. Any help will be appreciated.

4

If it is a prebuild version of unreal what you can do is copy the “BuildId” tag from another plugin within /Binaries/Win64/UE4Editor.modules into the same file of the “X” module.
For Eg: “BuilId” tag in
Engine\Plugins\Animation\LiveLink\Binaries\Win64\UE4Editor.module to X\Binaries\Win64\UE4Editor.module