CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unreal-engine4
PaulG
PaulG

Reputation: 7102

What is required to develop using Unreal Engine 4?

I have just paid the $19 fee to start using Unreal Engine 4 and have been playing around with the interface for a few hours now.

I've decided that it's finally time to start writing some code, but I'm worried I may not be equipped to do so.

My machine is 5 or 6 years old and running Windows Vista, I have Visual Studio 2008 Professional installed. I've noticed that Unreal seems to only support Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 (Professional only, not Express).

Do I need Visual Studio 2012 or 2013 to write code for Unreal 4? I looked around for Visual Studio 2012 but it doesn't seem to support Vista, and I don't really want to drop $399.99 on 2013 unless there is no other option.

I'm really excited to start work on a game with Unreal Engine 4, but can I? If I should be asking this question somewhere else please let me know and I will gladly move it.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 8183

Answers (4)

Frisbetarian-Support Palestine
Frisbetarian-Support Palestine

Reputation: 1311

You can start things off by using their graphical script builder Blueprints. The amount of things that you can accomplish with Blueprints is fairly amazing and they are actively adding in new features literally by the day. My opinion is that it should keep you satiated until you decide whether to get VS or not.

Upvotes: 0

PaulG
PaulG

Reputation: 7102

I ended up buying a copy of Windows 7 and downloading a student version of Visual Studio 2013 from DreamSpark.

This seems to be the only comfortable way to develop using Unreal Engine 4 as they support Visual Studio 2013 very well, including intellisense. It seems that UE4 and VS2013 go hand in hand.

My computer ended up being just too slow in the end though, where it would take almost 2 minutes for VS2013 to fire up, and over 4 hours to compile the UE4 source code.

A friend of mine ended up bringing over a beast of a machine and we set up our game dev environment on it, including UE4 and VS2013, and I managed to compile the UE4 source on it in about 20 minutes.

In the end, the answer is NO, my old machine as it was could not run the tools necessary to develop using UE4 "comfortably".

Ideally you would have a beast of a machine running 64 bit Windows 7 or higher, and VS2013 seems like a natural fit.

PS: I feel bad answering my own question.

Upvotes: 2

BoltClock
BoltClock

Reputation: 723388

The system requirements are listed here:

System Requirements

Desktop PC or Mac

  • Windows 7 64-bit or Mac OS X 10.9.2 or later
  • Quad-core Intel or AMD processor, 2.5 GHz or faster
  • NVIDIA GeForce 470 GTX or AMD Radeon 6870 HD series card or higher
  • 8 GB RAM

So it would seem that Windows Vista simply isn't supported at all. Presumably, this means Epic cannot guarantee that the engine, if it happens to run, or any version of VS that happens to work on Windows Vista is supported either. Unfortunately, you may be out of luck.

Upvotes: 3

DotNet NF
DotNet NF

Reputation: 833

"Do I need Visual Studio 2012 or 2013 to write code for Unreal 4? I looked around for Visual Studio 2012 but it doesn't seem to support Vista, and I don't really want to drop $399.99 on 2013 unless there is no other option."

You don't need to have vs2012 or 2013, generally you will just need the redistributables (I think this is what they are called) which are free to download and should automatically download when you install UE4.

Upvotes: 0

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