I have an old solution that used to work and had many versions and multiple installer projects, at some point one of the installer projects stopped creating msi/exe files.
small changes have been made to ProjectInstaller class and the project itself.
upon rebuilding the installer project the according to the log there are 0 errors, build is successful but no files are created.
sorry, my own mistake, there WAS an error in the build, it was neglected by the 'Error List' tab of the logger for some reason, which is strange,
now its just a missing file and I can work with that.