Engine build fails when running on a Windows service

This is a followup to my previous thread about building the engine Building and Distributing engine source - Platform & Builds - Epic Developer Community Forums

We have a setup for continuous integration builds of the Engine. Our setup is configured to run as a service in Windows Server 2016.

When the Engine is building, we get build errors when compiling UnrealSwarm.sln. Visual Studio complains that there was a configuration issue.

We discovered that if we have an account logged into the machine, either directly or through Remote Desktop, the problem goes away and the Engine build completes successfully.

We also discovered that if we run the command that fails, but use MSBuild instead of Devenv.com, that that also seems to work. Attempting to modify the source code for rocket builds to always use MSBuild instead of Devenv.com raised far more issues than it solved, however.

For now, I just make sure that my primary work PC always has an open connection to the buildmachine that handles the Engine builds. This isn’t an ideal solution by any means, so I would like to know if anyone has seen this and found any better ways to resolve the issue.

Hello,

After speaking with some others, it seems like it could be a registry issue, based off the windows error that was in your logs. The error mentioned this link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/983279

It’s possible that UnrealSwarm.sln needs to have access to keys in HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/… but when you’re not logged in, it only has access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/… This could explain the different behavior based off being logged in.

One of the people who had experience with using previously mentioned that there may be a configuration setting in to have it use a specific user account. Could you see if this is available and check if setting this up will fix the issue?

We haven’t heard from you in a while, Craig. Are you still having issues trying to set this up? If so, was my last comment of any help? In the meantime, I’ll be marking this issue as resolved for tracking purposes. Please leave a comment whenever you’re available and it’ll open back up.

We are still failing if we don’t have an open connection to the machine building the engine.

With the news that 4.13 has a new build process, I put this task on hold until we upgrade to 4.13 and I have a chance to try that out. I’m doing the upgrade now, so should know if my problem is resolved within the next few days.