Visual Studio not able to debug

If I try to debug with Visual Studio it pops up with the following error:

Unable to start Program "C\Program
Files\Epic
Games\4.7\Engine\Intermediate\Build\Unused\UE4.exe.

I reinstalled the Games Launcher and the Engine (4.7.5), but I’m pretty sure that I removed everything. After the normal uninstall routine I removed all remaining folders. Before the uninstallation debugging worked.

I also looked for “UE4.exe”, but there is no UE4.exe just UE4Editor.exe (in \Engine\Binaries\Win64). In the "\Intermediate\Build" folder there were only the following folders: Android, HTML5, Win32, Win64, but no “Unused” folder.

Can anyone help me?

Every help is appreciated.

1 Like

Hey Taimo-

Could you elaborate on what you’re trying to do. Are you using the binary Launcher or building from source? Are you trying to debug a project in VS or debug the engine? If you have an error when trying to debug, do you get a similar error when Building the project? Please explain what steps you took leading up to debugging in Visual Studio so that we may try to reproduce the issue on our end.

Cheers

Hey ,
thank you for your response. I should have been more specific.
I use the launcher binary (4.7.6) and the error occurs if I try to debug the project, just by pressing Start Debug F5 (I attached the error message). Everything else works fine, so building the project within VS and Compiling from the editor works fine. I work with Win7 64 Bit and MS VS Community 2013 Version 12.0.31101.00 Update 4.

I had some trouble with starting UE4 and therefore I uninstalled UE4.7.5 and the Launcher over the normal Uninstall Windows GUI. Additionally I removed all remaining folders which belonged to UE and Epic Launcher. I think the folder C:\Program Files\Epic Games remained after the installation, so I deleted the whole folder manually.

It could be that I had VS open during the uninstallation or afterwards and there were some dependencies VS couldn’t find because UE wasn’t installed anymore. Could it be that UE normally creates a symlink called UE4.exe in the folder VS can’t find, which links to UE4Editor.exe?

This error still occurs even after the update yesterday from 4.7.5 to 4.7.6

1 Like

Hi Taimo__,

The error that you are seeing is because you are trying to run the UE4 project through the Visual Studio debugger instead of your game project. This won’t work when you are using the binary version of the Engine that is installed through the Launcher.

If you look at your Solution Explorer window in Visual Studio, you should see two folders named Engine and Games. The Engine folder contains the UE4 project, where you can browse through all of the source code for the Engine, but cannot make any changes. The Games folder contains your game project. In your case, the UE4 project is the default project (it should be displayed in bold characters in the Solution Explorer). If you right-click on your game project, you can select the “Set as Startup Project” option in order to make your game project the default project. Now, when you press F5, the Visual Studio debugger will run your game project instead of trying to run the UE4 project. Alternatively, you could just right-click on your game project and select the Debug → Start new instance option, which is what I typically do.

If you download the source code from GitHub and build the Engine yourself from that, you will be able to run the UE4 project itself through the Visual Studio debugger (in addition to being able to modify the source code however you wish as long as you are complying with the EULA). This normally will just show you the Project Browser window, so it is of limited usefulness. If you have built the Engine from source code, there will be a third folder in the Solution Explorer window containing the source code for a number of programs that are working “under the hood” in the Engine. It is also possible to have multiple game projects included in a single Visual Studio solution, depending on how you set it up.

3 Likes

Sorry for the late reply, but thank you. Had another another additional problem that a GlobalShaderCache was missing, but this helped me out:

Just change the settings in VS and pay attention whether you chose Win32 or Win64

I just had this problem. What actually helped me was deleting the .suo file in the same directory of .uproject.
It was a misconfiguration of Visual Studio (That happened when I was switching engine versions).

I hope it helps! :slight_smile:

Hello Taimo,

I replied below, but I think you didn’t see. Can you try removing your .suo file (it is a hidden file, in the same folder as .uproject file) and try again? :slight_smile:

Thanks. That worked for me.

Make your game in VS solution as default project. After generating project files UE4 became default

Also don’t forget to switch to x64 if you plan to run / debug editor from VS.

This didn’t help at all. The thing was to set the project as start up instead of the engine.

This is what worked for me. Somehow UE4 became the default project.