Meta Oculus branch unreal 4.27 wont compile completely in Visual Studio 2022

[FokkusuES]

It also refuses to compile with 2019 (which was hard to acquire anyways since its out of support by Microsoft, but still recommended by Epic Games's documentation. We have installed every dependency mentioned in the documentation, there are no error messages in visual studio while compiling.

We are lost and have no idea, we are trying to onboard new members in the team and they can't work unless we all use the same unreal version, this is a huge issue. We would love to get any assistance if possible.

What is happening exactly:
- VS Studio compiles without issues but finishes faster than usual.
- Upon close inspection we find a lot of files missing, including UE4.exe and other binaries, like the shadercompiler binaries etc.
- No errors in VS Studio.

- And Engine of course does not start when pressing F5 since well most parts of the engine are missing.

Screenshot of the UE binaries missing

Things we have tried:

- Follow the documentation steps 1 by 1 exactly as outlined.
- Recompile so it tries again after cleaning cache files from previous compilation.
- Reinstall VS and all dependencies from scratch.

[MetaQuestSupport]

Hi there,

Thanks for posting into our forum. We can see you're having some developer related issues, and we'd like to provide you with our developer support to help out! You can head over to our Horizon Developer Support Center which contains tons of different resources and tools that are developers use on a daily basis to create the brilliant projects, which is what they do best!

We hope you can find something useful in there for you to use, have a great day!

[FokkusuES]

We will also do this but we will keep this open as well just in case a fellow developer has insight into this, thanks you.

[MetaQuestSupport]

No problem at all, sounds like a good plan!

[FokkusuES · Accepted solution]

For anyone reading this, we did not fix the issue, but we managed to sidestep it completely, we have a working version of this fork on one of our development machines, and we managed to use it to create a Installed Build doing the procedure described here and here.

With that we avoided having to compile the engine from scratch on our other development machines.

I'm going to list here all the information that we gathered about creating said Installed Build that is not present on epic's documentation that I liked. If you encounter our same situation and have a working compilation you can follow our very same steps.

We did in this order:
- Install dotnet-runtime-6.0.36-winx64
- Rebuild UAT automation in Visual Studio 2022 from engine project after full rebuild of engine.
- Install vs 2017 with all the standard components for unreal.
- Install vs 2019 with C# and Visual Basic Roslyn Compilers component alone.
- Install Windows Software Development Kit 10.0.22621 with at least the option Debugging Tools for Windows enabled.
- To check the platforms that the engine can build to we use this command:

BuildGraph -script=Engine/Build/InstalledEngineBuild.xml -listonly

- Running then runUAT.bat (in Engine\Build\BatchFiles\) with CMD console using these parameters, disabling every platform that we do not want to use:

BuildGraph -script=Engine/Build/InstalledEngineBuild.xml -target="Make Installed Build Win64" -nosign -set:GameConfigurations=Development;Shipping -set:WithWin64=true -set:WithWin32=false -set:WithAndroid=true -set:WithDDC=false -set:WithLinuxAArch64=false -set:WithLinux=false -set:WithIOS=false -set:WithTVOS=false -set:WithMac=false -set:WithHoloLens=false -set:WithLumin=false -set:WithLuminMac=false -clean

- Build shader compiler using Build.bat (in Engine\Build\BatchFiles\) with these parameters:

ShaderCompileWorker Win64 Development

- If there is an error about Hololens despite having disabled the deployment for it, go to the file HoloLensPlatform.Automation.cs and add to the top:

#define __MonoCS__

Then build UE4 before retrying the buildgraph command with runuat.bat

Compiled installed build is in LocalBuilds/ inside engine source folder