Unreal Engine 4, since the version 4.13, has in its kit a tool named BuildGraph, which they use internally at Epic to create the installed engine we can install from their launcher.

We are in the beginning of the port of our next game on consoles. Developing for console with UE4 requires, as you may be know, to build the game using the sources of the engine. What’s problematic is that the initial compilation time is really huge, opening the visual studio solution is slow, and every developer has to be aware of how to build the engine. Including artists or designers if they wish to deploy the game on the console to check how the game or a particular asset behaves…

To ease the development and allow us better iteration times, we thought of using BuildGraph to try to compile the engine with the support of the console platforms on our build server, and allow anyone on the team to use the engine as if they just had downloaded it from the Epic Launcher.

It turns out it is very possible, and very easy to do :)

The process is the same one we use to compile our game, and to check the pull requests we want to merge do not break the code or the assets.

We have a job on our Jenkins continuous integration server, which polls on the develop branch of the fork of the engine. Whenever a new commit has been pushed on that branch, the job is executed and two simple steps happen:

  • Checkout the branch locally
  • Run the build graph script through a call to a bat command

Pretty easy isn’t it?

About the second step, the documentation gives us the basic skeleton of the command:

BuildGraph -target="Make Installed Build [PLATFORM]" -script=Engine/Build/InstalledEngineBuild.xml -clean

And after a look at the default InstalledEngineBuild.xml you will notice that there are a bunch of options we can use to tweak the build. The first option being HostPlatformOnly which, when set to true, will unset the other platform flags:

<Do If="'$(HostPlatformOnly)' == true">
  <!-- Activate correct Target Platforms for host -->
  <Switch>
    <Case If="'$(HostPlatform)' == 'Win64'">
      <Property Name="WithWin64" Value="true"/>
      <Property Name="WithWin32" Value="true"/>
      <Property Name="WithMac" Value="false"/>
      <Property Name="WithLinux" Value="false"/>
    </Case>
    <Case If="'$(HostPlatform)' == 'Mac'">
      <Property Name="WithWin64" Value="false"/>
      <Property Name="WithWin32" Value="false"/>
      <Property Name="WithMac" Value="true"/>
      <Property Name="WithLinux" Value="false"/>
    </Case>
    <Case If="'$(HostPlatform)' == 'Linux'">
      <Property Name="WithWin64" Value="false"/>
      <Property Name="WithWin32" Value="false"/>
      <Property Name="WithMac" Value="false"/>
      <Property Name="WithLinux" Value="true"/>
    </Case>
    <Default>
      <Error Message="$(HostPlatform) is not supported for making an installed build"/>
    </Default>
  </Switch>
  <!-- Other Target Platforms always disabled -->
  <Property Name="WithAndroid" Value="false"/>
  <Property Name="WithIOS" Value="false"/>
  <Property Name="WithTVOS" Value="false"/>
  <Property Name="WithHTML5" Value="false"/>
  <Property Name="WithPS4" Value="false"/>
  <Property Name="WithXboxOne" Value="false"/>
  <Property Name="WithSwitch" Value="false"/>
</Do>

This lead me to this initial command :

bat "${env.WORKSPACE}/Engine/Engine/Build/BatchFiles/RunUAT.bat" BuildGraph -target="Make Installed Build Win64" 
    -script="${env.WORKSPACE}/Engine/Build/InstalledEngineBuild.xml" -set:HostPlatformOnly=true -set:WithDDC=false
    -set:WithPS4=true -set:WithXboxOne=true -set:WithSwitch=true

One hour and half later, when the compilation finished, I realized that the output folder did not contain any console specific files…

If you look at what is done inside the HostPlatformOnly block, you will notice that all the platform flags are Properties, with the same name as the Options in the beginning of the file. I suppose there is a limitation of the system which makes impossible to override a Property by an Option.

I then removed the HostPlatformOnly option, and manually set every platform flag we need to true, and the platforms we don’t need to false:

bat "${env.WORKSPACE}/Engine/Engine/Build/BatchFiles/RunUAT.bat" BuildGraph -target="Make Installed Build Win64" 
    -script="${env.WORKSPACE}/Engine/Build/InstalledEngineBuild.xml" -set:WithDDC=false 
    -set:WithWin64=true -set:WithPS4=true -set:WithXboxOne=true -set:WithSwitch=true 
    -set:WithWin32=false -set:WithMac=false -set:WinLinux=false -set:WithIOS=false 
    -set:WithAndroid=false -set:WithTVOS=false -set:WithHTML5=false

After an even longer compilation time (which was a good sign after all), I generated the Visual Studio solution file of our game, using that new Installed Engine as the source folder. And I was happy to see that the console platforms were correctly added to the project, and that I could deploy to the consoles directly from the editor.

You may find those links useful:

The second link in particular explains how to update the BuildGraph XML to add an extra parameter to set where the installed build files should be copied over, which is useful to export the engine in a shared location.