Plugins residing outside Game or Engine don't get deployed

New: Added the ability for plugins to reside outside of the Engine/Plugins and Game/Plugins directory. I saw this line in this release and immediately wanted to test this out. I was able to add the plugin from an external directory by adding the following lines in the .uplugin


    "AdditionalPluginDirectories": ["../Plugins/"]

which searches for my plugins fine and I am able to compile just fine. But when I try and deploy the application I get the following error:

 Can't deploy C:\Products\ProductDevelopmentUE\Plugins\BuLibraryPlugin\BuLibraryPlugin.uplugin because it doesn't start with C:\Products\ProductDevelopmentUE\PhotonMultiPlayer or C:\UnrealEngine-4.14.0-release

Which is enforcing the rule that the plugin needs to be either in the Game folder or the Unreal engine folder. So I am unable to deploy the project.

Changing line 377 of DeploymentContext.cs to this seems to work

OutputPath = CommandUtils.CombinePaths(InputPath.TrimStart(’/’, ‘\’));

Also I am unable to see the Plugins folder in my SolutionExplore of visual studio. But it still works fine though.

Hi TensaiSumo,

Thank you for pointing this out. I ran some tests and saw the same results that you described. I have entered UE-39359 to have this investigated further. If you would like, you can put in a pull request on GitHub for your suggested fix and reference the ticket that I entered for this issue.

I will see if I can find out some more information regarding whether the code for the plugin is expected to be included in the project’s solution in Visual Studio.