How I made Unreal Editor run

 Once I became a happy Unreal Engine 4 subscriber, I downloaded the compiled stable version and tried to run a blank project in the Unreal Editor. My happiness lasted till repeated crashes caused by the editor. In the first time the editor crashed when I played or simulated the level, then the editor would not run at all. I presume the problem was caused by the outdated video card drivers, but to come to this conclusion I made a little trip.

Compiling from sources 

 

The first attempt to fix the problem was compiling the current sources from the GitHub repository. I downloaded the last stable snapshot (v4.02) and followed instructions that led me to the final step - building the VS project, but during compilation VS argued that it can't locate such essential files like new.h and windows.h.

Then I checked out VC++ Directories project property and saw empty lines. For each category of directories I chose "inherit from parent or project defaults"  and VS started building. Since building a big project like Unreal Engine takes a significant amount of time on my laptop, I left VS working and went to bed.

In the next morning I found out that the project had not built because of some compilation errors. I made hot fixes of the problematic sources and built the editor, but it crashed at start again. I checked out logs and found weird error messages telling something about version incompatibility and memory corruption.

After that I checked out the master branch and the problematic sources - they were fixed in a proper way. The next step was compiling from the cutting-edge sources (actually v4.1). Although there were not compilation errors, the editor crashed when tried to compile shaders at startup. Looking for the solution to the error messages in my logs (telling that the engine "failed to compile default material /Engine/EngineMaterials/DefaultDeferredDecalMaterial.DefaultDeferredDecalMaterial"), I found a topic in the AnswerHub where the person said he/she fixed this problem updating video card drivers.

Updating video card drivers

Till that moment I had NVIDIA GeForce 320.xx driver. Updating to the last driver (at the moment 335.23) and rebooting Windows finally solved the problem: all the shaders compiled successfully and there have not been crashings so far.

At the end I have a cutting-edge editor, but still very demanding to the system resources. I hope the efforts of the community and Epic Games will led us to a more stable and optimised engine.