Thanks for the info.
“for the plugins: you should make sure the ones you are using are on and vice versa for not using on first initialization of the project”
I did so, but that resulted in the problem I described of no longer being able to open the project browser.
I see that you suggest to not commit the binaries and that all users would therefore then be required to recompile the binaries in order to use the engine. That is not a tenable setup, for one the binary build times are horrendous, and we really shouldn’t expect non-programmers to have to do that.
I did figure out the bat file question already, I kept trying to do it ue3 style, but eventually found out just double clicking the project file launches its editor and therefore the bat file simply needed to be equivalent to that.
“not sure about custom engine version”
By ‘custom engine version’ that simply means a git release source build of the engine ( as in NOT what the UGL gives you), and just to be clear ‘custom engine version’ does not imply changes to the engine nor changes to the literal ‘engine version’ it was more the language I was seeing used to describe source build installs/copies of ue4 that could be modified.
“Now I have never seen the issue your having with different versions of unreal. so clearly some one is on a different version, so pick one version and stay with it all the way”
I think there is confusion about what constitutes different versions of unreal (I know I am confused about it at least!). For example the UGL only lets you download official release versions, and it doesn’t allow more than one copy of the same version. However source builds are not managed by this ‘manager’ at all, although it does appear that projects created from source builds show up in the UGL projects field, the actual source build installs do not show up as installed versions of the engine. So taking UGL out of the picture, initial version association of a project is inherent to which ue4 install you created it from. After that you can change the version association of the project thru the uproject r-click method. The aspect of this that I initially did not understand and seems you did not understand either is that each source build install/copy is essentially a custom ‘version’, even if they are unmodified and identical to say a official release UGL download/install.
As far as I can tell this association has to be set for each local copy, and doesn’t appear to be something that is commit-able to the repo as it is dealing with relative paths that may differ per-user, in other words each developer has to make sure that each project copy or otherwise is correctly associated to the appropriate corresponding engine install (which in our case is source build).
This is likely the cause of the “project was made with a different version” issue. If I make sure latest binaries are committed, and devs know to associate the project properly that seems to resolve it.
For source control we are using tortoise svn, have a local server and such, so no problems on that front.