UE 5.3 do not open Editor after generating C++ Project

[ToriGoldballs]

I can offer you some help from the Garuda Linux world. I was previously using Unity on Windows.

The crash issue that I have is sporadic: it turns out that the project creation doesn’t always run the GenerateProjectFiles.sh script that creates the *.kde4 project files. For me this script is located in the base UnrealEngine directory “UnrealEngine-release” (I built in my Documents using the zip from github since it wouldn’t let me check it out). I’m guessing that when the editor attempts to startup it fails silently when it doesn’t see the required C++ project files.

I can’t find the original post for this at the moment, but the user said they found it on another page that they could no longer find, and it seems similar to this one:

Linux - Project Files not generating

Permissions are fine, but what do you mean with out-of-build folder? The GenerateProjectFiles.sh must be located and run in the UnrealEngine folder, and my Project is just in the default path UE4 creates projects in. I’ll check that log idea.

The commands that worked for me are:

./GenerateProjectFiles path/to/project/ProjectName.uproject -game
cd path/to/project
make ProjectNameEditor

This will create the ProjectName.kde4 file, and the .kde4 hidden directory. I added these to a script called “GenerateC++ProjectFiles.sh” that takes a project name. You should now be able to open the project in UE, and you can open the .kde4 project in KDevelop.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why the script wasn’t run to begin with I suspect it has to do with the fact that I built UE myself. I will probably move UE to the expected location but as I’m just getting back into Linux after a 5 year hiatus I’m not sure if /usr/bin/ is a good place or not (if anyone knows where UE should get dumped that could be helpful to future users).

Now, to get it built and running.

There is an anonymous user on these forums that configured UE4 with KDevelop (~4?). I’ve hooked up UE5 to KDevelop 5.12 based on their guide:

Setting Up KDevelop for UE4 Projects in Linux

I’m new to using KDevelop and it took me a while to scavenge the information needed to get it working reasonably well so I just wanted to document what I do when setting up a UE4 project with KDevelop in Linux for anyone else that may be struggling with it and maybe to get some pointers from others who might know more about this than I do. I’m going to assume that the unreal source code is in “~/UnrealEngine” (this is the top folder you get when you clone the repo). So here goes: Create a n…

Note: some of the options have moved around in KDevelop 5, Includes/Imports and Defines are now under “Language Support”.

Edit: When I originally wrote this up I thought that the lack of any definitions in the .kde4/Defines.txt file was correct in that there just weren’t any yet. Kdevelop’s intellisense error on my objects made me realize that there was a missing DLLEXPORT definition for PROJECTNAME_API seen in the header. I did a grep in my project directory and found the file “Definitions.ProjectName.h” which includes “SharedDefinitions.Engine.Cpp20.h”. I did some find replaces to get the form TOKEN=Value and used those. (I omitted the #undef section since everything was redefined after the comment.) Most errors are now gone, just an FYI.

The actual Build Configuration I chose (under “Custom Build System”) is the one that matches the UE project name. When you build and run this, it will launch Unreal Engine for your project where you can test out your changes.

I also found this discussion about the build configurations and the build tools that you might find useful:

Linux development pipeline

Thank you again. I followed the way you suggested and succeeded. As far as I understand if you plan to work with repository you should push/commit only the *.uproject file plus Source and Config directories. The rest is automatically generated. I tried to play with UBT command line options to generate just the CMake files and avoid generating the rest. I found the documentation for command line options here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/…DEs/index.html but unfortunately there are opti…

I haven’t been able to make any of the other configurations work, and now I think they might only be relevant to Unreal Engine itself when you go to build for distribution:

Build Operations: Cook, Package, Deploy, and Run

Good luck!

And now I’m off to learn the basics:

Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation