I’ve been using Rider for Unreal since about 2020 and the license just expired. It’s been free. I’m not sure if I can renew the public preview license or I’m supposed to start paying for Rider?
It seems like the public preview is still around. I also don’t see Rider for Unreal Engine as a thing I can even buy a license for, which makes me think it’s still in public preview and I should continue being able to use it for free?
There is no license (free or paid) for Rider for Unreal going forward. Rider for Unreal was strictly an early access/preview build.
But, the Unreal support has been rolled into the full version of Rider so if you buy a license for that it includes the features you’re used to from Rider for Unreal. It’s one year license so you have to keep ponying up, but there are details for a perpetual/fallback license after you been paying for 1 year. It’s a little convoluted honestly, so you should checkout their own explanation of it.
There are definitely benefits to Rider over Visual Studio. Like pretty much everything is better there vs Visual Studio. And I’ve loved Visual Studio for years. But when I tried Rider for Unreal, all the code lookup and everything you’d expect is nearly instanteneous and works as if you were working with a higher level language like Java or C# and not a language like C++ which is closer to machine code.
Also at work I’ve been using Android Studio which is also IntelliJ. Somehow not flipping between IntelliJ and Visual Studio, and only using IntelliJ in both my professional and hobby life has been really nice. I don’t have to try to understand two tools. The funny thing is I used to work at Microsoft for about 5 years, and even then I mostly used Xcode because I was an iPhone developer for 4 of those years.
As much as I enjoy using Rider, this just isn’t true. Yet. I would almost always prefer VS for debugging. JetBrains is making improvements (symbol server support is currently in early access) but there are still things that make it inferior in my eyes.
But since the editing and navigation are what I spend most of my time doing (even while debugging), Rider’s superiority’s there tend to make the debugger problems a background issue.
Yep, it is paid product now. But you can check in your mailbox, most probably you received “A special 25% OFF release offer for Rider with Unreal Engine support”. The discount code is valid until October 21, 2022