Microsoft's Visual Studio 2013 'Community Edition', iOS & 'droid Support Announcement

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Just wondering, in the context of Microsoft’s big announcement today that Visual Studio is released in a full-featured free community edition, support for targeting iOS & Android netively, etc, what are Epic’s plans to support the development platform (I assume it will more or less at some point), and how the current XCODE and Android NDK/JDK efforts?

Specifically, in the short-term, does Epic recommend developers move to 2013 Community Edition? I’d sure love to get better debugging going! Is going to Visual Studio 2015 Preview a good or bad idea? I’d rather not waste a lot of time trying it out if it’s not going to work.

Longer term, how does all effect Epic’s multi-platform strategy?

Tanks in advance…

2

Is it really native? I looked at it and it just seemed to be well unity integrated. And that is what they mean with ios and android.

3

If you want to preview the new features, install VS2015 Preview. But expect some unfinished features and bugs. Usually, the RC version is a stable one(RTM is final version). Alle the CTP’s and preview versions are unstable.

Any version before RC could interfere with your existing Visual Studio installations, so I recommend installing it in a virtual machine.

4

Here’s a link to a Gamasutra article on the matter. Free if your company is making less than $1 Million a year, not bad!

5

Not bad at all! Best part is I have my plugins again!!! I can’t stand the express version personally… :wink:

Here is some more discussion on :
Visual Studio 2013 for free! - C++ - Epic Developer Community Forums!

7

I’m not sure if Microsoft is using their ARM compiler. From what I gather, the final build needs to run on a Mac in order to comply with Apple’s ‘walled garden’ requirements.

8

Visual Studio only supports building iOS/Android apps using HTML/Javascript on-top of the integrated version of Apache Cordova: http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/explore/cordova-vs.aspx

is not the same as native compilation, so compiling a C/Obj-C/C++ codebase like UE4 for Mac/iOS will still require using Xcode on a Mac.

9

Yup, but if there is a Mac with the relevant tools on a network ( can be done via a VM on a Mac, for example) VS will have the Mac build the relevant files.