So I havn’t touched UE4 for a few months, 4.18 I think was the last one I was using. Just tried 4.21 as I saw that intellisense now works which is handy as I only had a trial version of Visual Assist which has ran out.
I’m not really that au fait with visual studio having spent most of my programming days in Unity and Mono…less said about that the better…so these questions may be a bit daft.
So with visual assist everything was nicely coloured, if something was white it usually meant something was wrong. Without visual assist and just using the intellisense most things are white…its kind of boring to look at and keeps making me think i’ve screwed something up like missing an #include…then i compile and everything is fine (sometimes). Is there a way to get more meaningful colours going on?
With visual assist F12 took me to the definition (may be using the wrong word there) of something…without it it doesn’t seem to have the same desired results.
For example, typing in say (function name probably slightly wrong not in front of the UE4 PC):
notifyactorbeginoverlap then hitting F12, it used to take me to the source actor or component so I can see the params…now it seems to give me a list showing where that function is ran in other class’s. Am I being an idiot here?
Talking of params…if i start to type a function it pops up the function/params and tells me there’s overloads…can’t seem to switch the overloads to see what the other overloads are though. Also when I get to the opening bracket…the pop up disappears and I can’t see the param list anymore which is slightly tedious. What am I doing wrong?
Lots of stuff isn’t giving me any suggestions like it used to. UPROPERTY for example doesn’t give me any of the options like VAX used to do.
Whats the best way forward, go back to using VAX and switch off the intellisense? Do VAX and intellisense work together or is it a one or the other jobbo?
In my experience Intellisense is unreliable since quite often and unpredictably when you use the shortcut to go to a function or variable’s declaration it freezes the IDE up for up to a minute while searching/updating Intellisense. Its likely due to the size of UE4’s codebase which it all needs to search and Intellisense wasn’t made for projects that size. Regardless of the reason, VAX is much better in my opinion.
Yes you’ll have to pay for VAX but in my opinion its worth it. And having worked with Unity and C#, I also know out of the box IntelliSense works much better for C#, but that also may be because Unity being closed source there is less code to scan.
Cheers Zhi all makes perfect sense. I’ve gone back to VAX and yeah its defo quicker…and more colourful
this sentence from the docs doesnt seem to be agreeing with us:
IntelliSense recompiles C++ as you type. This is a lot more powerful than VAX’s syntax checking, as it uses a full C++ compiler that verifies every line of code. This will speed up your workflow dramatically.
The optimal thing to do is actually use both…
I use F12 and “Peek Definition” all over the place until the thing breaks. (VAX won’t enable that, you need IntelliSense)
If I disable intellisense database, navigating code starts feeling like searching pages in google…
The problem is in waiting for the project to launch with that setup; I usually open project at morning then go to drink a cup of coffee for a few minutes while them both tools scan the project.
And never ever close it again while working.
If Visual Studio was closed then I just… I just don’t want to open it again for today lol
Yep… Today I just begun work and there’s 12 VC++ compiler processes running while they scan the game code (I have 12 cores). Kinda heavy when I need to keep both Visual Studio and Unreal Editor open…
Yeah i have to say its quite tedious using visual studio and UE4 at the same time. Its fine adding some code to an existing class but becomes annoying adding c++ classes through the editor then having to recompile.
Missing the easy and instant compile days of Mono
but up on the upside im not having to pay £70 a month just to be able to enable shadows
