C++ with Visual Assist, Visual Studio and Unreal Engine
It's inspiring that software like Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE and Epic's Unreal Engine have been "free" for so long now. It pains me to think about where indie developers would be without the forward thinking force of these larger companies and their seemingly never-ending generosity. Helping start-ups and the like to get their feet on the ground is something I will forever be grateful for.
Although the tools come close to it, it would be naive to think that they can fulfil the job of every requirement. I want to point out a few problems we were facing at Distalsoft when it came to developing in Visual Studio using Unreal Engine and the solution we ended up going with.
Unreal Engine at its core uses the C++ language. Visual Studio - being a Microsoft product - makes development in C# very enjoyable. On the other hand, development in C++ has been a point of frustration for many years. From VS 2010 to VS 2017, improvements have been made to the overall speed of compilation, Intellisense, file searching and the like, but it has taken until 2019 for them to really make a dent in the problem. I must say that VS 2019 has done an excellent job of addressing the aforementioned issues but the question still stands - could it be better?.
A few years ago when I was using VS 2015, I'd had enough. I'd sometimes be waiting several minutes for Intellisense to bring back a list of methods or properties that belonged to an object. I'm pretty sure we've all done it - smashing the heck out of the ctrl+shift+space keys and cursing at the screen while waiting for the Intellisense to pop up. Or simple searches in the solution explorer that end up taking longer to resolve than simply finding the file yourself. Perhaps even trying to navigate to the definition of a method only to be waiting minutes for the document to load up. Something had to change. I went searching on the internet for a solution. It didn't take long to stumble across a piece of software called Visual Assist by Whole Tomato. It had been recommended many times on various parts of the AnswerHub forum for Unreal Engine and StackOverflow. Due to it having a trial version, I downloaded a copy to give it a try.
The expression "night and day", really doesn't do the software justice but it'll have to do for now. I was extremely relieved. Searching for files, definitions, even just including header files were now as you would expect from an IDE. The additional dialog menu that is available when right clicking on bits of code you want to perform actions against, has a variety of options that make you realise what was/is missing from the ootb VS. To be honest, I don't use half of them, but it's the baseline mechanics that just work so much better. And, to address my biggest issue - the speed of Intellisense - type-ahead now loaded within seconds and sometimes even instantly. What a relief!
Unreal Engine have improved their documentation, but unfortunately it's still not quite there. I would always see people answer questions in AnswerHub with "Look through the Unreal Engine code, it's open source". I always assumed they were joking. Pressing F12 to go to method definitions without Visual Assist would take forever. Thanks to my new found friend Visual Assist, I finally had the ability to go find the answers to some of the most annoying questions. It's hard to really communicate just how irritating it used to be. Seriously, Visual Assist has made me a happy C++ coder again.
I suppose the last thing to make note of is that Visual Assist is not currently free, but the trial is sufficient to make you realise just how much happier you can be when using it. I would be interested to see Visual Assist introduce a subscription based payment plan, but you can't complain. They have done a stellar job at creating a brilliant tool.
So in conclusion, go check it out. See for yourself. You won't be disappointed.
This blog is also featured at https://blog.wholetomato.com.
Published at: 1 Dec 2019