How to USE Unreal without installing visual studio ide on Windows
- downlod visual studio build tools bootstrapper
Go to Download Visual Studio Tools - Install Free for Windows, Mac, Linux
find and download “Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019” (or direct link )
Copy that executable to any location like D:\
-
open command prompt and go to the executable location if its D:
cd /d D:\ -
Download necessary components by running below command prompt.
vs_BuildTools.exe --layout D:\vs19_buildtool --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktopBuildTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.MSBuildTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetCoreBuildTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.CMake.Project --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.x86.x64 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Llvm.Clang --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Llvm.ClangToolset --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.ComponentGroup.NativeDesktop.Llvm.Clang --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows10SDK.19041 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.NuGet
Note 1: There are some are extra components above which can be avoided like c#, netcore5 llvm-clang, some components of Managed desktop build (ue5 uses netcore3.1 and nuget, on ue4 even those can be removed)
Note 2: Run step 3 in the future to update the vs build tools
- Install by running from command prompt
D:\vs19_buildtools\vs_setup.exe --noweb --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktopBuildTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.MSBuildTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NetCoreBuildTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.VCTools --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.CMake.Project --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Tools.x86.x64 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Llvm.Clang --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.Llvm.ClangToolset --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.ComponentGroup.NativeDesktop.Llvm.Clang --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.Windows10SDK.19041 --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.NuGet
- Install vscode, notepad++, QtCreator, or any other editor and enjoy coding!
Note 1: Unreal will detect the vsbuild tools automatically. You don’t need visual studio if you don’t use c++ with Unreal4-5.
Note 2: VS build tool 2019 and 2022 will work on windows 7 with all updates. But Unreal 4.26 and above is fully funtional only on windows 10 and above. In some setup even 4.25 has some issues with win7 and visual studio
Note 3: vs build tools 22 can also downloaded similarly. But Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.ManagedDesktopBuildTools has changed and now individual components of that workload has to be added if you want to use it with unreal 5. Also vsbt22 has packing issue with ue5, so as it said it is better to stick with older compilers, instead of new and shiny when it comes to programming.
NB: Edited to keep up with changes from ms. For some reason ms constantly keeps chainging how such offline tools can be dowloaded and used.