Install and set up visual Studio
Unreal Engine 5 is a powerful game development tool that allows you to create high-quality games. It is essential to have a proper code editor to take full advantage of its potential. Visual Studio Community is a free version of Visual Studio that offers many of the features of the paid version. This article will show you how to install and configure Visual Studio Community with Unreal Engine 5.
Step 1: Download Visual Studio
You need to download and install Visual Studio on your computer. You can do this free from this link
Step 2: Install Visual Studio
The Visual Studio Community installation will first install another program and run it. The Visual Studio Installer; this tool is needed because Visual Studio is not only used to create video games with Unity and Unreal Engine. So we need to install the packages we need.
Step 2.5: If I have Visual Studio installed
You may be coming from Unity or already using Visual Studio for other reasons. No problem; you go to the program search bar and type in Visual Studio Installer so you can change the packages installed in the version you use of the program.
The packages you need for Unreal Engine and Unity are easily recognizable; you will find them under the Gaming section.
In this case, we want to work with Unreal Engine, so we need to install “Game development with C++.”
Step 3: Download and install Unreal Engine 5.
For this step, I refer you to my previous article in which I explain how to install Unreal Engine.
Step 4: Configure Visual Studio Community as the default code editor for Unreal Engine.
Open Unreal Engine and select “Editor Preferences” from the “Edit” menu. Select “Source Code” from the sidebar on the left.
Select “Visual Studio 20xx from the list and close the preferences.
Unreal Engine will likely ask you to restart the project to recompile everything.
With these simple steps, we have installed and configured Visual Studio with Unreal Engine 5. Now you can use Visual Studio as a code editor for Unreal Engine 5, taking advantage of its power and flexibility to develop high-quality games.
Note: Visual Studio, like all software from Microsoft, will ask you to have a registered account. This process is entirely free.
Visual Studio is one of many editors you can use to write C++ code, but we will see the alternatives in another article.
I hope you found this article useful.
See you in the next article🚀.
