Gears 5 developer, The Coalition, is partnering with the Microsoft Visual Studios development team to integrate Unreal Engine 5 tools and features into Microsoft Visual Studio.
In his latest dev blog update, Game Dev Product Manager for Visual C++, David Li, revealed the third batch of Unreal Engine 5 integrations in Visual Studio 2022, which have been made possible by collaborating with the Gears 5 developer, The Coalition.
According to Li, The Coalition’s work on the popular Gears of War franchise inspired the Visual Studios development team to ship a new feature that allows users to search for Blueprint UFUNCTION references. Today, the development team has unveiled additional performance improvements and a host of new features that, according to Li, will take game development productivity to new heights.
New Unreal Engine 5 Tools & Features for Microsoft Visual Studio
The new Unreal Engine 5 tools and features revealed for Microsoft Visual Studio are listed below.
- Unreal Engine Blueprint Find All References
- Code Analysis for Unreal Engine: Naming Convention Checker
- Special Macro Indentation Rules for Unreal Engine
- Improved Doxygen Comments Support for Unreal Engine
- Build Insights Integration
- Performance Boosts for C++ Game Development
The development team used a real-world AAA Unreal Engine 5 game to benchmark the performance improvements in Microsoft Visual Studio 2022. They measured the scenarios by capturing internal logs. To replicate real-world game developer workflow, they used a gaming PC with high RAM and core count. The biggest performance improvement noted was a 3.2x speed-up in Visual Studio’s parsing of C++ projects during the first run. The team received valuable feedback from game developers on how to enhance this area, and, according to Li, they are eager to hear how much more productive developers will be when opening projects for the first time.
Additionally, thanks to community and game developer feedback, the development team has allocated additional resources to focus on the Solution Load and Close scenarios. Lastly, they have made additional performance improvements to colorization and search on top of previous improvements.
