Unreal version control across a team

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hello,

I would like to hear any thoughts on keeping the Unreal version standard across a team of developers rather than trusting them not to self upgrade. We have already had a case where one developer updated to the latest version and now some plugins don’t work. They also did a full install which has taken virtually all of their hard drive space.

Is there any way around this?

2

First, if you don’t have trust, you have nothing. People with good intentions will follow the shared process, assuming they know and understand it and why it’s beneficial.

If this is important, then the onboarding onto the project should emphasize this, and it should be socialized in the organization. In general, adhering to a process is for the benefit of everybody, even if some individual preference might not be the same as the process. That’s what it means to be a professional, and that’s why it’s a job and you get paid to do it.

Ideally, the process should provide standard machine images, or containers, or at least scripts, that isolate everything needed for reproducible builds. Another benefit of that is that your automated tests and release builds (which are automated, not run on someone’s personal machine, right?) will also use the same setup, and thus there won’t be as many “worked on my machine!” problems.

Other things that can help:

  • Check in the “approved version” built editor binaries in source control, and install shortcuts that start them. It’s OK to enforce a particular disk path/location. (Even beneficial, on UE5, where long paths break the build)
  • Standard hardware configurations that have enough disk space. A 4 TB M.2 disk really isn’t that expensive, compared to, like, a day of engineering time.
  • Consider cloud development images. You don’t even need to do development locally, if your workstation runs in the cloud. There are some nice Unreal AMIs for Windows on the Amazon cloud, and you can make your own based on that, too. The benefit of this is that you control the setup 100%, and it’s very easy to revert any bad system changes. The draw-back is that this generally costs significantly more than local workstation hardware.
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