When I’m working within VS it is constantly not updating things properly, i.e. the intellisense or if I include a new header it doesn’t seem to be parsing the files. I am also having problems with compiling the project. It is saying the code compiles fine within VS but the changes are not being picked up within the editor; it seems to lose it’s connection?! Today has been a day full of shutting the Editor and VS down and restarting to correct these issues.
Just wanted to check if this is normal-ish behaviour or if there was something i could do to ease these issues.
Occasionally hot-reload will break when a header changes. It’s not ideal but it’s pretty easy to fix: Close UE4, Build in VS, reopen UE4. For large projects where the header is heavily used you may have time to grab a coffee, but it shouldn’t be too painful in general.
Can’t really help with Intellisense other than to do the usual recommendation of Whole Tomato’s Visual Assist addon. When I tried this back in the VS2013 days it suddenly became a lot more useful for UE4 work, indexing fairly quickly and presenting me with useful suggestions. Never used VS’ own Intellisense library in UE4 since then.
(May double-post similar replies here. I seem to have lost my first draft…)
i find wierd things in this area too, make a change in code then the system compiles in ue4 and works fine, completely breaks the function of the code in editor. I found that the hot reloads are held so if i do something in c++ and change it and blueprint accesses it i have to close down the editor and reopen it for the blueprint to point to the correct hot reload.
Regarding the VS/UE4 losing it’s ‘connection’, this seems to be just the way it is at times, although things were partly my fault as it seems that when you add things like new Delegates to your code or add a new header file it is always best to shut both down and do a restart… it makes things play so much nicer.
Regarding the intellisense lagging behind/not updating properly, I decided to take both Resharper and Visual Assist (thanks @Molt for the heads up) for a spin. Resharper seemed to make things 100x worse for me with boot up times being nearly 30 mins for Resharper to get it’s act together. Visual Assist on the other hand has made things 100x better with speedy performance all round.
I’ve abandoned trying to hot reload the editor all-together. Seems to cause random crashes and things don’t always reload properly. Rebuilding is just way more reliable.
Visual Assist is a must when working in UE4. I’ve completely disabled Intellisense thanks to it.
My guidelines for hot reloading is to only do it for minor changes, i.e. changing how the innards of a particular function work, rather than trying to hot reload serious changes to objects, esp. if they’re relied upon by other objects that are currently active in the editor/engine. That’s just a recipe for disaster at this point!