Plugins Are Only Working For People in a Package Game if they have C++ Project

[Sandstrike]

I bought the Extended Text plugin from the marketplace and that too doesn’t work in a content only packaged game.

[Spoondog]

[MENTION=1345]Ben Marsh[/MENTION]

It’s unlikely that we’ll have hybrid-monolithic game builds before the 4.8 release (ie. plugins in DLLs, game in an EXE), though I have done a lot of the ground-work to support that. We do, however, plan to support packaging content-only games with plugins in the 4.8 release. The editor should detect if you have a non-default plugin enabled, and generate a temporary build target to link it in as necessary, prompting you to install Visual Studio/XCode through a free download if you don’t already have it.

It’s not as slick as we hope to make it, but it’s a step in the right direction.

So it’s been a while, but I don’t suppose there’s been any further steps in this direction recently? It’d be so good to shed the compiling requirement completely for plugins.

I recently released a game on Steam and needed some plugins to fill the Steamworks void in the stock BP nodes. It’s good that you only need VS installed for the plugins to work, but for me it meant I now technically had a “code project” (in that I could no longer deploy to iOS without acquiring a Mac, and having to build from a Mac meant I ended up having to compile from full source, meaning if I need to upgrade engines for updated SDK support or something, I’ll have to merge code without really knowing what I’m doing)…

[Ben_Marsh]

Afraid not; we did put some more work into hybrid monolithic builds, but ran into a limit of 65,535 exported symbols from a single binary on Windows (yes, that is a lot. :)). The alternative would be to use non-monolithic games, which is what UT does for mod support. It comes with a performance penalty though, so I’m not sure it’s something we’d want to enable by default.

[Nate]

@Ben Marsh;635265

The alternative would be to use non-monolithic games, which is what UT does for mod support. It comes with a performance penalty though, so I’m not sure it’s something we’d want to enable by default.

Hi Ben, how much performance penalty we’re talking here? I always like to try monolithic build since I noticed that’s UT is using.

[Ben_Marsh]

I don’t actually have any hard numbers, it’s just an assumption on my part. It’s definitely something we should measure.

[OptimisticMonkey]

So just want to make sure - it is impossible to deploy to device from windows on a bp-only project if you are using a plugin, correct?

[DownToCode]

So I have published a plugin recently and got somebody coming back to me complaining exactly about this issue. They can only package for mobile if the plugin is in the project’s folder, doesn’t matter if the project is blueprint or C++.

I can see that this is from 2014 and just wanted to confirm, is this still really a limitation of plugins in Unreal?

[LKiv]

So, it’s year 2021 and we are in version 4.26. I am guessing this is still not a thing?

[LekaKeisari]

2023 here. I got a plugin from Marketplace and after a few hours of fighting with it I finally managed to get it included in the packaked game. This was in UE 5.2 built from source. I did the following:

• Copy the plugin folder to Engine/Plugins/Marketplace
• Create a C++ class to convert the project from BP to C++
• Rebuild the Engine
• Go to ProjectName/Source/ProjectName/
• Open ProjectName.build.cs
• Add plugin names PublicDependencies. In my case it was like this: “PublicDependencyModuleNames.AddRange(new string[] { “Core”, “CoreUObject”, “Engine”, “InputCore”, “UINavigation”, “NiagaraUIRenderer” });”
  NOTE: You can find the plugin name by navigating to the plugin folder and opening the .uplugin file in your IDE
• Rebuild the project in your IDE

After these steps I packaked the game and plugins got included.