UE4 and Visual Studio 2015

Hi everyone,

Now that Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2015, and they are encouraging people to use their latest version, I wanted to take a moment to remind everyone that [Strike]Unreal Engine 4 does not currently support Visual Studio 2015. Yet. We are working on finalizing support for Visual Studio 2015, and it will be coming soon in a future release version. For now, please continue to use Visual Studio 2013 as we will not be able to provide support for Visual Studio 2015 until the Engine officially supports it.[/strike]

If you need to download Visual Studio 2013, you can do so from this page. Click “Visual Studio 2013” on the left side of the page, and make sure Community is the selected option (or whichever version you are looking for). Choose your language and format from the options, and click Download. One quick note about the “Web (Online)” format option: The file that was downloaded for me here in a couple instances did not have an extension. Adding a .exe extension allows you to then run the installer.

We will make sure to let you know when Visual Studio 2015 is supported by the Engine.

Update (04/11/2016)
Hello again. I just wanted to provide an update for this post. Visual Studio 2015 is now fully supported by the Engine. Visual Studio 2013 can still be used with the Engine for now, but we plan to phase out support for that version of Visual Studio in the near future. Since a Visual Studio 2015 solution is created by default, in order to get a Visual Studio 2013 solution you must run GenerateProjectFiles.bat with a “-2013” parameter. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the Shift key and right-click in an empty area of the Windows Explorer window that is showing your Engine root folder. Select the option to Open command window here, then enter the line “GenerateProjectFiles.bat -2013” (without the quotes) and press the Enter key.

Note:
When installing Visual Studio 2015, the default installation options do not include the Visual C++ components that are required by the Engine. You will have to make sure to select these components when installing Visual Studio 2015 or you will receive error messages when trying to use the Engine.

I think we need some details on whether it will be implemented in 4.9 or not.

Trello:

Unreal Engine 4.9 Preview notes:

We certainly understand the desire for more information in this area, and we do want to have support for Visual Studio 2015 available as soon as possible. We are still working to ensure that we are able to take advantage of as much of VS 2015’s new capabilities as possible without introducing any new bugs into the Engine. Unfortunately all I can say at this point is that we are close, and getting a little bit closer every day, to having support for VS 2015 implemented.

Yeah i see this too the last week, don’t put fake notes next time.

so 2015 is here officially :slight_smile:

what is the outcome of this? will we see 4.9 supporting vs2015 and released soon?

2VS on my system are consuming to much space :P.

They edited the preview post:

We have to wait just a bit longer :confused:

Edit: From Stephen Ellis:

So I assume the full release in 1-3 months.

4.10? Wow, time to get used to 2 visual studios on PC

Just 2? I have 4! Oh wait, I have VB6 too, so 5.

I am unable to download Visual Studio 2013 from the link you provided or from Microsoft DreamSpark. The only VS that is linked to is VS 2015. I would like to learn more about the Unreal Engine, but I cannot compile code with it, currently as I only own a copy of VS 2015 Community.

Will we be able to at least compile the engine using VS 2015? I really only need to be able to do that :\ When I attempted on 4.8, it says that Studio is not installed (looking for prev versions).

The link provided has VS2013 as I just downloaded it myself via this post. You need to scroll down a little and look to the left side of the page. It’ll open up an accordion that has the various versions as well.

Hi JKelly8008,

As MDurbin mentioned, the downloads for VS 2013 are there, but you have to go looking for them. Microsoft obviously wants everyone to move to the newest version, so they put that right in front of everyone. The VS 2013 download options are a bit further down.

Thanks :slight_smile:

According to Fricker during the last stream they’re working on this ofc and they try to publish it with 4.10.
Sauce:

Great! It works.

I am watching that, now. 4.9 looks very interesting.

UE4 and C++

Hey Unreal Team,

Just interesting.
What is your C++ policy?
What do you think about new c++11/14 standards?
What do you think about retaining c++98/03 support in the codebase?
I’m asking this because unlike other compilers microsoft forces people to use the latest VS (2015) and compiler (VC++14, or v.19). They do not provide --std options like gcc, clang (don’t know about intel compiler and some others).
So, VS2015 bring a good level of c++14 support and it will become more and more with Update(s) 1, …
GCC (5+) and clang (3.4+) already support full c++14.
I understand and agree that establishing c++11/14 coding policies, practices, rules requires some time. Developers should learn the new features.
Will you drop VS2012, VS2013 support? Or maybe you’ll support latest and previous VS versions: VS2012+2013 becomes VS2013+2015. (Not sure here if there’s still VS2012 support. Only see it in some places in code and scripts.)

And a few questions about the next C++17 standard. :slight_smile: Again because MS implements some accepted drafts into VS2015.
What is your feeling about it? (I’m almost sure you are interested in some reflection changes that allow to drop a lot of macros.)
Do you take a part in developing of the new standards? Maybe in the new SG14 Games and low latency?

Sorry for possible duplicates. (please, give me a link to the existing post(s))

p.s.
From the video above you’re talking about building master branch sources in VS2015.
To do this we need to write something like that: GenerateProjectFiles.bat -2015
But this does not work because in https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/blob/master/Engine/Build/BatchFiles/GenerateProjectFiles.bat there is no entry for VS2015.
We have ‘call GetVSComnToolsPath 12’ and ‘call GetVSComnToolsPath 11’, but we don’t have ‘call GetVSComnToolsPath 14’.
I created a simple patch http://pastebin.com/WsxibnpG. Cannot do a pull request atm.
Can you apply it? Or maybe just ping a dev team about this issue or open a ticket whatever.

regards,
lz

@lz, Not part of the unreal team so cannot officially speak for them. Your patch is rather minimal in terms of what actually needs changed to do a VS 2015 build. I’ve been working through the issues myself just out of curiosity I guess but have around 85 file changes so far just to do compiles. If I complete an actual build I’ll post more about it but it will likely be some time and official support is more likely to be released first.

Currently what I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of breaking changes and deprecated behavior or maybe actual fixes in VS 2015 that cause problems. Some ones that confused me like “int xyz:1;” not allowing 1 to be assigned because its signed is annoying but easily fixed.

A lot of the big issues I’ve encountered are either related to to workarounds to previous compilers flaws or errors in third party libraries or lack of support of third party libraries for VS 2015. For example, Qualcomm has not released their Adreno SDK with VS 2015 support. This is needed for Android builds so I just disabled those for now but not sure the Unreal team can really do the same. Also some DirectX and OpenGL headers don’t compile any more due to casting issues. I’ve been disabling the warnings/errors to get around those but presumably that will only go so far and some seem like errors look like they shouldn’t actually be ignored but properly fixed.

I’d be surprised if they don’t know about these and its more like they are waiting to get proper support from third parties before committing any of the changes to avoid giving us a half solution or confusing statements.

@anonymous_user_9c39f750 Other Abbott, I did following steps:

  1. Clone UE repository ‘git clone …’
  2. Switch it to the master ‘git checkout master’
  3. ‘git pull origin master’
  4. ‘Setup.bat’
  5. Apply my small fix
  6. ‘GenerateProjectFiles.bat -2015’
  7. Build solution from VS2015
    And it works! All targets were built without a single error (only 1-2 warnings as I remember). I ran Unreal Editor, it works too.
    Seems you have outdated sources or something else.

And yes, all third party sources should be built with VC++14 toolchain in order to release UE4+VS2015.

Well that’s embarrassing. I was using the remote release branch after all so you were correct about that. Such a pain to switch and rebuild all of it again as the Thirdparty folder does not switch happily. Anyway a diff between the two still yield dozens of changes from my perspective including 5 others in the batchfiles folders. But I guess I’ll try this all over again and see how I fair. A number of changes I made were also made in master so presumably I was on the right track in any case.

Update: With the release of 4.9 yesterday, support for Visual Studio 2015 has been partially implemented. It is currently only available when building the 4.9 Engine from source code. In order to be able to use Visual Studio 2015 with 4.9, you must run the GenerateProjectFiles.bat file with the “-2015” argument. This will create a Visual Studio 2015 solution for the Engine. Omitting the -2015 argument will result in a Visual Studio 2013 solution.

Visual Studio 2015 support is still considered to be in Beta, so we do not recommend using it for active project development at this point. If you experience any problems with using Visual Studio 2015 with the Engine, please let us know on the AnswerHub.