So, forgive me if this sounds completely ignorant, I’m only reporting what I have observed. First, quick details about my environment:
- Windows 7 X64
- Visual Studio 2013 with latest updates
- Latest UE4 source from the repo as of 6 hours before this post (how long I’ve been trying to figure this out).
First off, good job on making the build process easier!! Super awesome being able to just get up and go in a couple of easy steps. However, once UE4 was built, VS2013 started acting extremely weird. Nothing was rendering anymore in the IDE. I would click a line of code in the editor, and nothing would happen. I’d double click a .cpp file and nothing would happen. If I click VS2013 at the top to drag it, suddenly it starts receiving render updates again. So basically, being a software engineer that is intimately familiar with the Windows message pump, it seemed as though the VS2013 window was no longer receiving repaint messages until it was triggered by a drag message.
If I open a window such as an options window, nothing updates in there and there’s no way to trigger a repaint as you cannot drag VS2013 while a modal dialog is open.
Going to Programs and Features and preforming a “repair” on VS2013 fixes the issue, but building UE4 again causes the issue all over. I have not tested whether this is specific to UE4, but UE4 will also cause VS2013 to crash. Is it possible that UE4 overwrites some important files that VS2013 needs? I’m not sure what is going on, I’ve never seen such broken software before out in the wild!
Image Descriptions
Images where taken in three subsequent actions. In the first image, I show how the toolbar area of the client updates but nothing in the client area does. The 3rd one I demonstrate how everything fixes itself after forcing a rendering update via dragging VS2013 around.
Broken 1:
- You can see the toolbar area showing the path to whatever I clicked on, this area updates just fine.
- You can see that my marque is on line 23
- But the selected line is line 25. Clicking anywhere in the code area or the solution explorer area will have no affect on the render state of VS2013
Broken 2:
- You can see in the top red box that after clicking elsewhere, the toolbar area of the client updates just fine.
- You can see that the marque is just after </summary> despite the fact that line 25 is clearly highlighted.
- You can see where my mouse is ACTUALLY hovering over Environment at line 27, and the tooltip that appears as well.
RenderUpdate:
Everything is fine! But only for that one frame state, the moment you click anywhere you will see that no more rendering is happening.
Extensions:
Same problem in modal dialogs.
I really have no idea what to do… Uninstalling and reinstalling has no affect, and Unreal is what seems to break it. Should I report this as a bug to Microsoft? It seems like a winAPI bug… Not sure why building UE4 would cause this.
EDIT: It is just building and running UE4 from source that causes this problem. I am able to run UE4 from the launcher and compile and run a blank project just fine. It should also be mentioned that UE4 did not run the second time I tried after reinstalling, just terminated, and the first time it crashed while trying to create a new project while running in debug mode (also crashed VS2013).