I work with an established company where we use Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate for development. Our past projects have been developed using Unreal Engine up through version 4.9. There are very attractive features that have been added since then, but we cannot use them because you have dropped support for Visual Studio 2013.
It would be very expensive and time consuming to update all of our systems to Visual Studio 2015. I feel it’s unfair to ask that we either spend thousands of dollars to do this or to switch to an “express” version of the IDE, simply to use whatever new engine features have been added.
On a technical level, what are your reasons for removing support? What, specifically, are you using that makes UE4 incompatible with older IDEs?
Edit: we are not intending on restructuring an old project simply to test new few features. What we would like to do is work with new versions of the engine as move on to new projects. Moving to a free version of the Visual Studio 2015 is not viable because we rely on features that are not available in the community edition.
Expensive? I don’t thing so. The community edition is free.
Epic has stressed enough that you are NOT supposed to UPDATE if you are in production unless you really need the features (“attractive” is not a proper reason to almost break a project).
Update (04/11/2016)
Hello again. I just wanted to provide an update for this post. Visual Studio 2015 is now fully supported by the Engine. Visual Studio 2013 can still be used with the Engine for now, but we plan to phase out support for that version of Visual Studio in the near future. Since a Visual Studio 2015 solution is created by default, in order to get a Visual Studio 2013 solution you must run GenerateProjectFiles.bat with a "-2013" parameter. The easiest way to do this is to hold down the Shift key and right-click in an empty area of the Windows Explorer window that is showing your Engine root folder. Select the option to Open command window here, then enter the line "GenerateProjectFiles.bat -2013" (without the quotes) and press the Enter key.
, VS 2013 is still supported. There is NO reason not to update to a 2 years older version of some software. Even microsoft told developers to do so.
I’m sorry, perhaps I did not make my situation very clear. I did not say we were planning on updating old software with a new engine version. That’s simply not a good idea. The systems I referred to are our development systems; that is, our development environment and workflow. We wish to use new engine features in future projects, not current ones.
As I stated in my original post, we should not be expected to switch to the community version when we are already making use of the Ultimate version of Visual Studio 2013. We are making use of testing and architecture tools in VS 2013 Ultimate that are only available in VS 2015 Enterprise. We cannot use the community edition; such a switch would cut us off from a feature set that we current use as part of our regular workflow.
There IS a reason not to update a piece of software when it will cost thousands of dollars to do so and the current edition is still fully functional. Microsoft still provides support and updates for Visual Studio 2013. I don’t consider two years to be a very long life span for a compiler, or any major piece of software for that matter.
Still, thank you for response. It does provide a workaround for the time being, although it will be removed in future versions. As helpful as that is, though, what I am really looking for Epic’s technical reasons behind the deprecation. I would to know exactly what it is that Visual Studio 2015 provides that 2013 does not which will prevent Unreal Engine from being compiled on it in the future.
Visual Studio 2015 includes many new
improvements that should help your
workflow, including support for new
modern C++ language features like
uniform initializers and delegating
constructors. The new compiler is also
very standards-compliant and will
detect more errors in your code.
…
If you need to continue using Visual
Studio 2013, you’ll need to compile
the engine yourself from the GitHub
source code. The primary reason for
not supporting Visual Studio 2013 in
the launcher distribution is because
the additional precompiled binaries,
debug symbols and static libraries for
both versions of the compiler would
have significantly increased the
engine size and caused project setup
to be more complicated on Windows.
We’ll be fully retiring support for
Visual Studio 2013 in an upcoming
release.
As Zarkopafilis mentioned, it is still currently possible to use Visual Studio 2013 when building the Engine from source code. However, we do plan to drop support for 2013. Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns.