Hello,
I’ve started my transition from Unity to Unreal.
I’ve been using Rider 2020 with Unity and had a blast.
I wanted to know if there are UE Rider users and hear about pros and cons about it (Especially compare to VS2022).
How did Rider treat you so far? Im curious.
Best,
with Rider for Unreal the only real advantage it currently has is their proprietary semi-copilot for line completion, and auto #includes (this is similar to C# using directive, but more explicit down to the file containing the header)
all the other things about “Rider knows Unreal Engine” is quickly being eaten away with just updates to VS2022 (even the Community Version if you need to evaluate) even without Visual Studio Co-Pilot, at some point you should be knowing what classes you are including.
I have even seen the semi-copilot for Rider either put the wrong include or miss the include which is the biggest selling point it actually has.
everything else is Eco-system, and theming (which if you really want you can modify the theme of visual Studio if you need)
Rider supposedly has better “refactor” helpers, but I have never actually experienced a difference in the systems, and you should be double checking renaming things anyways.
Thank you for the input. ■■■■. I kinda wanted to hear Rider actually do more than that (I really had a good experience with Rider2020 with Unity 2021)
Rider for Unity shows how computation can be over-computed or show lots of way to refactor suggestions…
VS2022’s function definition copied to clipboard seems to be one of the good thing too.
Are you still using Rider or moved to VS2022? If you are still using Rider, can you share more of your experiences?
I never really go into the co-pilot type features; maybe for the “boiler plate” stuff, but for functionality get it working then be cute with it.
for the function definitions in VS2022 you can hover over the unimplemented function get the lightbulb icon, and then have it generate the skeleton of the function. one short coming it still has is that VS doesn’t directly understand that some UFUNCTION directives mean there will be no implementation in C++, but the Unreal Header Tool / Unreal Build Tool allows for the compilation to succeed.
I stopped using Rider for Unreal before the end of the evaluation period, I don’t meat the break point for VS Professional, so I can use the Community version.
it may have improved, but every so often we will still get people on the forums because Rider didn’t know to populate an include; and the asker has gotten so used to having Rider do includes for them, that they are not used to looking through the docs to find the include they need. the funny part is Rider is “smart” enough to still allow you to see a list of members and contexts without the include, but it either doesn’t know the correct include for the Header Tool, or just has all of the Engine actively in its LSP; and it will still fail to build because the missing include…
Rider for Unreal came out as an alternative to Visual Studio + Visual Assist, but everything Visual Assist or Rider does above Visual Studio stock is on the level of patches and updates to the LSP. You can even get close to the Rider proprietary Co-pilot with with well Co-pilot or even asking ChatGPT or the forum when you run into something you are having real trouble with.
Rider is exellent for Unreal Engine which is why you will notice that most companises working with Unreal Engine is using it.
You can see where a C++ functions is being used in Blueprint. It is true that it gets includes wrong sometimes but so does VS and Rider will also help you implement the correct plugins that a include might require. Rider also helps you with core redirects if you are renaming a Class used by Blueprints.
I used to like VS and VAX but since Rider matured it feels a lot more tailored to Unreal Engine than VS would ever care to be.