COMPILING UNREAL ENGINE 4.20
In our next tech post, Steve Longhurst will show you how to compile your own version of Unreal. Not only are we at DO-Games experienced with Unity, but also Epic Games’ Unreal Engine. This video will show you how to compile your own version of the Unreal Engine, an essential starting point for console development and porting.
If you are using the Epic Games Unreal Engine v4 to make a game, and you plan to port to a console such as Xbox One, Switch or PS4, you will need to compile your own custom version of the engine, from source. Epic Games only supply the console support plugins as source code once you have signed up with the console manufacturers development program and signed their Non Disclosure Agreements.
Building the engine yourself might sound daunting, but it's really not hard, and Epic Games provides several useful documentation pages on how to go about it. Good places to start are:
Compiling your own Engine is also a very good way to dig into the inner workings of Unreal, using the Visual Studio debugger. If you write C++ code (not just Blueprint logic), you can debug step through your code and right into the Engine source, allowing you to learn what’s really going on under the covers. Lastly, it also means you can fix bugs or add missing features in the Unreal Engine, which we think is one of the big selling points of Unreal for anyone with coding experience.
This video is my experience in compiling the Unreal Engine, on Windows 10, using Microsoft Visual Studio 2017. Reading the documentation will give you all the theory, but it often helps to see someone actually perform the steps. Just ten minutes of watching this video and you will have first hand experience for when you come to do it yourself.