This seems like a potentially neat way to avoid the Visual Studio IDE bloat… ?
MS have released a standalone Visual C++ installer without an IDE, and Visual Studio Code is a lightweight code IDE… has anyone tried to put them together, and would there be any pitfalls or gotchas ?
Workaround:
You could use notepad to write your code, The editor is up to you.
HTH
Sure, but you still need to install Visual Studio. You can’t create a project without it.
Yeah, I suppose that would be ~3GiB that some people won’t need.
This makes a good point in that light.
Looks like Visual Studio Code 1.0 was released today: Visual Studio Code 1.0 Release
Given how lightweight it is I wonder how much effort it would be for Epic to support it?
Could go a long way in reducing the largest barrier to entry
I don’t really see using Visual Studio as a ‘barrier to entry’? If you’ve got a machine sufficient to run UE comfortably you’ve got one that’ll handle VS.
So, I think for people trying to convince their companies to use UE4 for internal projects or even as an alternative to Unity for commercial projects (where Unity has VS Code integration #handled already), this is a VERY significant ‘barrier to entry’… you lose the “but you don’t need to pay unity up-front license costs” argument if UE4 is tethered to an IDE that costs several times (thousands) more per-seat than the Unity license in the first place…
I think this is an important feature for small (but not revenue-less) companies if they want to use Unreal. Being tethered to Visual Studio is a curse unless you’re a 5 man team w/ no significant revenue or a multi-million dollar corporation that can afford six-figure annual dev environment costs for your team.
Anyone from Epic have thoughts on this?
Visual Studio is not a “thousands of dollars” investment, and if your company makes less than $1m USD or has fewer than 250 PCs, you can use community edition.
VS pricing page:
For standard subs (non-cloud based), it appears that through MS Store a PRO license is $1,199 per user per (first) year + $799 renewal cost per user per yr. Enterprise (which larger companies I’ve been at have had) is $5,999 first yr + $2,569 annually after.
Imagine you work for a small engineering contractor (lots of these types of companies all over the world) w/ 25-30 employees. Based on those numbers, Pro license would cost over $30k first yr + $20k annually after and Enterprise would be over $150k first yr + $65k annually after. This is a difficult pitch for a shop where people like to dev on Windows, Mac & Linux and people are already sold on Unity.
Can’t use VS community b.c. we make over a million in revenue (revenue != spare cash to blow on whatever tools you want), but w/ 25-30 engineers’ salaries to pay, the company’s spare cash-flow is not enough to justify buying a VS sub for $20-30k annually for your engineers.
I’m pushing to start using Unreal for internal projects to spare us the Unity up-front license costs (and my own interest in UE4 :P), but it doesn’t make sense asking people to introduce another technology into our environment unless there’s some financial or technical incentive. The VS license cost significantly hurts my pitch - plus, the fact that we (and our clients) work on Windows, Mac & Linux boxes (mostly Linux) by necessity. It doesn’t make sense to drop thousands of dollars on VS as an IDE when it only runs on Windows and it adds yet another tool to our already insanely large library of tools that people need to keep up with.
I can also tell you we’re not the only tech / engineering company in this position - I know others that would benefit too. I’m only reaching out b.c. this is a really crappy reason (IDE support) not to be able to use UE4 (which I’m loving so far in my personal use) for simulation / VR projects at work.
Why can’t you use the cloud subscriptions or standalone licenses? You picked the most expensive options from the page.
Actually, after looking into the cloud subs more (I’ve only had msdn standard licenses at previous companies before so I thought cloud subs were limited or something), they actually do look like a better deal.
Still ~$15k / yr to sign my company up (or $75k for the poor souls w/ similar employee counts who blow cash on enterprise cloud subs) - so that price for an IDE that no one will use outside of the hours spent on UE4 projects + 5% royalty = good luck getting folks to leave Unity. Oh well, guess Epic isn’t concerned about this part of the market… fair enuff…
I personally love windows dev haha - I do miss my MSDN license a bit 
I’ve spent majority of my time lately on linux boxes because of clients and we have a lot of engineers who have just always used linux. We’re a simulation software company and have our hands in some decent VR projects too, so we jump between OS’s all the time.
Plus some of our sims have to integrate w/ real-time embedded hardware-in-the-loop and most of the embedded folks have built their dev environments on centos / rhel…
Haven’t gotten around to trying to run UE4 on Linux to see for myself whether it’s pretty turnkey or as painful as I’ve heard… word on the street from some people who evaluated it at work was that it wasn’t super turnkey on linux and there was little support / help. For the record though, the Windows build system for UE4 is solid - just tethered to Visual Studio unfortunately D: Epic would make my day if they did something about this 