We are currently investigating modifying the Unreal Engine source code, which requires using custom builds. At the moment the launcher doesn’t appear to support these in anyway, so I was interested in modifying the Unreal Engine launcher so that it can support downloading and updating custom builds from an external URL hosting a manifest file.
Roughly I think this kind of support would involve:
- Being able to create packages of custom engine builds that are suited for deployment with the launcher (I believe the UE build scripts already have support for this somewhere).
- Modifying the launcher so that users can add manifest URLs, which would point to a HTTPS URL with a JSON manifest (usually hosted on like S3 or GCS), which in turn lists the available engines and their download URLs. This manifest would then be used to populate additional engine versions in the UI and to automatically check for updates for custom builds.
The primary issue for us right now is that while source code access for Unreal Engine is great, we don’t want to sacrifice usability for our artists and designers. They don’t know how build source code from GitHub using Visual Studio, and without an easy way to install the latest engine changes as we make them, it’s going to make our development pipeline much slower.
Is the source code for the launcher available anywhere, and if not currently, when will it be available?