First off I am primarily a creator. A third party plugin supplier is trying to keep up with pre-built releases of a plugin by putting pre-built releases onb github. Whenever I upgrade ue 5 to a point release, he lags behind supplying a new pre-built release. He also provides the source to the plugin.
What can I do to avoid having to wait? I don’t want to become a UE developer. I’m a filmmaker. If I download his source and place THAT in the engine plugin folder, will UE automatically build that source into binaries on the first load? Do I have to install Visual Studio/.NET COre/SDK blah blah to get that to happen? Again I am NOT interested in game development, packaging, or developing C++ modules for my UE projects, but to keep up to date with the UE 5 point releases, I need 3rd party plugin binaries to be up-to-date builds with UE. There have been NO coe changes to this plugin for years.
Often when a developer hasn’t released an update it is because there are issues - UE5 has some major changes under the hood - I’ve had to re-write large sections of mine to run, I can imagine most other dev’s will have had to as well.
Yes you would need to install VS to build it - and you run a big risk it won’t compile, or there are crashes and bugs if it does compile.
This developer has kept up to date with UE 5 ea, 5.0 preview, and 5.0. There are no changes to the source. He states that every time UE comes out with a new release, even a POINT release, he has to rebuild with that release and distribute prebuilt. He has suggested that if end users want to keep up “build” compatibility, to build it themselves. I don’t mind doing it if I don’t want to wait.
Oher devs have complained that if a point release has nothing to do with their code (a device driver, for example) then the only thing they change is the version in the .plugin file. I can do that myself and rebuild their source.
So again, I ask: what are the requirements for me to be able to do that? Say I simply want to package my game into a Windows package? What do I need for that?