We think MetaHumanLiveLink.uplugin is missing a proper list of SupportedTargetPlatforms

Development Character & Animation
, ,
1

The problem: After we enabled MetaHumanLiveLink plugin, our .uproject file wants to constantly update but it breaks our non-Win64 builds.

The long of it:

We’re enabled MetaHumanLiveLink for our project. Our project is built for Win64 some other platforms. Since MetaHumanLiveLink has a dependency on MetaHumanCoreTech, it inherantally has a SupportedTargetPlatforms list of “Win64, Linux” that MetaHumanCoreTech does but it doesn’t explicitly state it.

Since the uproject wants to be constantly updated and remove the SupportedTargetPlatforms to match that which is listed in the uplugin instead of what is actually required, we get developers accidentally submitting the uproject file removing SupportedTargetPlatforms from MetaHumanLiveLink. This inevitably breaks building on those non-Win64/Linux platforms. The error we get is:

MetaHumanCoreTech.uplugin is referenced via MyProject.uproject -> MetaHumanLiveLink.uplugin with a mismatched ‘SupportedTargetPlatforms’ field. This will cause problems in packaged builds, because the .uplugin file will not be staged. Launch the editor to update references from your project file, or update references from other plugins manually.

So we’ve made an engine change to update the MetaHumanLiveLink.uplugin file to add a SupportedTargetPlatforms field that includes only Win64 and Linux. This matches that in MetaHumanCoreTech and ensures the uproject file isn’t accidentally changed again. We think you all need to do this to the vanilla version of the engine to prevent this problem for others who build for non-Win64/Linux and want to utilize MetaHumanLiveLink in their development tooling pipelines.

2

Hi, thanks for reporting this. We also ran into the same issue, but for different reasons, during the work for the 5.8 release. We’ve made a fix, but it’s in a different direction from yours. We’ve removed the dependencies in MetaHumanCoreTech that forced it to be compatible only with Windows and Linux, and stripped out the SupportedTargetPlatforms section from the plugin file. The change involved was trivial (although I can’t say for sure there weren’t other dependent changes for 5.8). If you want to take a look at implementing that locally, it’s in CL 48028706 (or I can provide a patch file). I think that change should resolve the issue that you’re running into?

3

Yeah, that’ll be part of the 5.8 release

4

And the expectation is that fix will be in 5.8 or 5.8.1 right?

If that’s the case, we don’t need a patch or anything else for now. We’re on 5.7.4 and plan to update to 5.8.1 or later once available.