I don’t think that the manually-installed version of the plugin will work if it’s moved to the Engine plugins. You may need to install it on a per-project basis. Does the plugin work if you move it to the Plugins folder of your project? You may need to create the Plugins folder if it does not already exist.
Yeah unfortunately you can’t just copy a working plugin from a project to the Engine/Plugins/Marketplace directory. You need to “package” the plugin as an engine plugin first. You should be able to do that by going to Edit → Plugins, finding the Cesium for Unreal plugin in the Geospatial section, and clicking the Package button.
It can be a bit persnickety though. For example, you need a Release build of cesium-native (and should either delete the Debug build, or make sure it is up-to-date). You also need exactly the right Xcode, or at least you need to build cesium-native targeting the right Xcode version.
Epic documents the requirements in the release notes for each version. Here it is for UE5:
So basically when building for macOS, we need to target Xcode 12.4 and macOS 10.15.7.
It’s an unfortunate reality of C++ that all these little details matter a lot, and nothing works if you get them wrong.
BUT we recently added UE5 macOS and iOS builds to our automated build process. So at this point you can just grab pre-built binaries included with the release. We’ve submitted them to the Epic Marketplace too, so they’ll be available there as soon as Epic approves the submission (should just be a day or two).
The automated build is useful, too, because it serves as a detailed recipe for building Cesium for Unreal as an engine plugin. Here’s the recipe. Note the job for each platform:
