Do I need to download the engine twice?

Development Programming & Scripting
1

I downloaded everything as discribed in the video ‘Downloading and Building UE4 Source’ and now everything was working well.

Now I wanted to visit the marketplace to get some additional content and for that I needed to install the UnrealEngineLauncher. So I did. But immediately another download of 7GB (engine) + 3GB (content) started. So now it seems like I have the complete engine 2 times, one time in the github folder and another time in the UELauncher folder, although the size of the github folder is a lot bigger (about 15.7GB) than of the UELauncher folder (about 10GB still downloading the content).
I just would like to know what is what. Which folder will be updated automatically and which one uses VS etc.?

thx a lot

2

Now I wanted to visit the marketplace
to get some additional content and for
that I needed to install the
UnrealEngineLauncher. So I did. But
immediately another download of 7GB
(engine) + 3GB (content) started.

If you installed originally from source the Launcher client isn’t there, therefore it does need to download this content.

So now it seems like I have the
complete engine 2 times, one time in
the github folder and another time in
the UELauncher folder, although the
size of the github folder is a lot
bigger (about 15.7GB) than of the
UELauncher folder (about 10GB still
downloading the content)

This seems to be the case if you want to compile from source, you effectively need two copies to run correctly, the good news is that updating the engine won’t require you to download the entire 2 required + optional files from the repo but most likely just a new source ZIP under 100MB.

I just would like to know what is
what. Which folder will be updated
automatically and which one uses VS
etc.?

The source you got from github allows you to build directly from source.

The one that you get through the client is updated automatically.

3

first of all thanks a lot for the quick response!

so if I want to add new classes in cpp that for example implemet a new AI or parts of it or some other function I need to start the editor from the github-folder and as long as I just want to use blueprints I can use the other one?

4

No, you can create new CPP’s from within the editor, however the main engine/editor files will have been compiled into DLL’s not allowing you access to their CPP content if there are any bugs.

5

ah, ok. thanks a lot.