UE4 full rebuild every little change

Hi,
Do you know why engine full rebuild (engine, game, plugins, etc) everythime for small changes (for example add comment in some cpp file in game project) ?

One possibility is that you don’t have proper write permissions on one of the folders or files where UE caches build data.

I’d be curious what your build log says.

Where can I find these logs ? I turn on Diagostics for MSBuild, but I don’t see anything there.
I trying with clean, remove binary and intermediate, but this is not helping :confused:

I found a lot of lines similar to this
“ActionGraph.DeleteOutdatedProducedItems: Deleting outdated item: D:\unreal_projects\UnrealEngine-4.26\Engine\Intermediate\Build\Win64\ShaderCompileWorker\Development\Core\ShaderCompileWorker-Core.lib”
I only change something in game code

You might try just Shift+Delete-ing your Engine/Intermediate folder? Or is that what you did when you said you removed binary and intermediate?

Are there now a ton of files in the Intermediate folder? Can you check the timestamp of one of the .lib files to make sure it’s correct? Have you changed any settings in the build tool?

Just trying to determine why it would think the items are ‘outdated’.

If you want to dig deeper into it, you can look at the IsActionOutdated function in Engine/Source/Programs/UnrealBuildTool/System/ActionGraph.cs

Looks like it checks if the item exists, was produced by the same command line, if any prerequisites have a newer timestamp than the last time the action was executed, and if any dependency is newer.

Yes, I removed binary and intermediate :-/

If nothing else works, in visual studio you should be able to choose to build only the project if you click the build dropdown (in the file, edit, etc row) and have a project file open.

I end with fresh new copy of UE4 :slight_smile: And for now it’s working :slight_smile: