Project targeted to local source build always rebuilds engine when building the project.

Development Programming & Scripting
1

I’ve seen some other ancient threads about this issue but it seems that nobody has found a solution so I’m going to try asking myself.

For some reason when I target my project to a local source build of Unreal 5.3.2, when I build my solution in Visual Studio it always rebuilds ShaderCompileWorker and UnrealEditor. This is extremely time consuming (it takes over an hour to build just these modules with the engine on an SSD, and it took fifteen hours to build the engine when I had it on an HDD), and there’s no apparent reason for it to be happening. I noticed in the project settings under NMake it was appending “-target=ShaderCompileWorker” to the build commands, but even after removing that it’s still rebuilding multiple engine modules for a normal project build.

My project has two native code plugins and an empty native class, and that’s it. It shouldn’t need to be building anything in the engine at all once the engine has been built the first time.

Not only that, but I’m still getting ‘modules are missing or built with a different engine version’ on one of my projects immediately after building.

I’ve worked on projects in the past that have used custom local builds of the engine (4.24-4.27, not 5.x), and they haven’t had this issue. WTH is going on?

2

You seem to have your solution set to compile the engine instead of your project

In your solution explorer open up the games folder => your project name. Right click it and set it as the default project.

Now it should be marked with bold letters. You should be able to compile the project quickly.

3

Nope, that is not the issue. Default project is set to my project. Even right-clicking the project and selecting Build from that menu instead of selecting ‘Build Solution’ from the Build menu will still recompile engine modules.