As previously announced, Visual Studio has partnered with some of the most popular game engines to bring you an easy acquisition experience for game development tools. Today we are pleased to confirm that we now provide the ability to acquire and install the Unreal Engine directly from the IDE.
What is Unreal Engine?
The Unreal Engine is a cross-platform game engine targeting DirectX 11 and 12 for PC and Xbox, OpenGL for iOS, OS X and Android, and WebGL for the Web. Console development on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 is also available on the Unreal Engine for registered developers of those platforms. Unreal Engine also supports virtual reality development targeting platforms including Oculus, PlayStation VR, SteamVR and Gear VR.
Unreal Engine games can be programmed using C++ and Unreal’s visual scripting framework called Blueprints. Visual Studio serves as a powerful code editor and debugger when using C++ for Unreal development.
Unreal C++ code inside Visual Studio
Visual scripting with Blueprints
Getting Started
From Visual Studio you can open up the new project dialog using the FileàNew Project option and navigate to the installed templates, under which there will be a Game folder. Inside you will see the options that Visual Studio currently provides for creating a game, which now includes Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine template will not appear if Unreal Engine is already installed on your machine.
Selecting this template will automatically launch a series of dialogs that will guide you through the Unreal Engine installation.
After selecting install, the Visual Studio installer will launch with the Unreal Engine checked. Click the Next button and you will be presented with a link to the Unreal Engine license, where clicking Update verifies that you have read and accept those terms and continues with the rest of the installation.
Gametime
One the installer has completed, the Unreal application will launch and you are now ready to start making games!
For more information on Unreal development, check out the following resources:
Getting Visual Studio Setup
Unreal Development Docs
Cheers,
The Visual Studio Team @ Microsoft
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Adam Welch, Program Manager, Visual Studio Team Adam joined Microsoft in 2012 after graduating college, fueled by his passion for software development and game design. He has worked on the Visual C++ debugging and diagnostic tools, including the native memory profiler, and more recently began focusing on game development tools for Visual Studio. |
