I just went through the steps you offered here and yes, Project Only -> Build … invokes UBT only once and only for the game modules. Build -> Build Solution (or F7 by the default binding) invokes UBT for each project in the solution with their individual “Build” command lines.
Thank you for clearing up this issue!
I had a same problem and I can solved that by unloading engine project on visual studio(right click on project folder and click on unload project) so only game project will be compiled and also compile button on unreal engine will work.
One thing you can do is right click ck on your project and you can see project only.Click on it and you can click build project only.It will help you
Perhaps this is just because of my project setup, however, the UE5 project is only included so that the UE5 Engine source is in the Solution. Unloading it does nothing. The Unreal Build Tool is still being used, so most of the VS features will not work - it is built via CMD.
I solved my problem, I compile from editor, okey dokey now.
I found that if I erase all the meshes I made that were huge and I got rid of all the 8k textures and the system became more lite. Amazing most of the time my compiling now is under 30 seconds directly from the editor and more rare around 1 min, this from 3 mins usually and sometimes above.
So I solved my problem but this points out to memory managment problems, a design not so great for unreal that if you have a huge project with lots of high rez texture and meshes going above 2000X2000 saved under the editor it’s going to create for some reason these problems with memory wasteage.
I’m still in unreal 4, so I can’t talk about the latet version of unreal 5. going to switch to 5 also.
So there you have it the reason for unreal long compilation times is part of the memory managment as I suspected. For large projects you have to have saved things under the editor that are huge in size.
Crazy… I get 20 secs usually now directly from the editor.
I guess a workaround would be to have two dif projects and in one where everything is to the minimum with textures and meshes you just compile to see how you code turns out and then move it out to the other.
I never thought of cleaning up my project and leaving just a few things in there, I thought I give it a try and it worked, I usually load all the textures and everything once I built a new project for some reason. So I operated to the minimum and the compilation times for C++ droped to lower times.
So there you have it, I thought I share this with who ever is compiling from the editor to avoid loading the editor each time to check the results of the compilation.