Rider for Unreal Engine Update Comes With Significant Debugger Enhancements

Anastasia Kazakova

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Hi,

We want to thank everyone who shared their feedback on Unreal Engine 5 in Rider for Unreal Engine Preview! We are happy to see that so many people are using Rider on a daily basis to create fantastic Unreal Engine games.

It’s time to share a new version with our community! It brings more fixes for Unreal Engine 5 projects and unveils our debugger overhaul, which significantly improves the way variables are rendered in the debugger.

JOIN THE EARLY PREVIEW

Improved Natvis support

Rider for Unreal Engine comes with an LLDB-based debugger that has been implemented by our team. It offers support for Natvis files and automatically finds and loads UE4.natvis, providing user-friendly views of Unreal Engine data types.

In this update we’ve added major improvements to the debugger renderers and Natvis support.

The following Visual Studio Natvis customization features are now supported:

• Inheritable attribute, which specifies whether a visualization applies only to a base type, or to a base type and all derived types.
• Format specifiers, which control the format in which a value is displayed.
• CustomListItems, which allows you to write custom logic for traversing a data structure. This change is especially useful for the updated containers in Unreal 4.26 (RIDER-52336), like TMap and TSet.

Built-in renderers:

• Rider now automatically generates one-line summaries for all structures not covered by Natvis, and summaries are now colored to increase readability.
• Rider shows the [Raw View] for Natvis-generated values.
• Built-in formatters are enabled for wide/Unicode strings (wchar_t, char16_t, char32_t).

And other fixes:

• Enabling sorting for variables affects only the top level and preserves the member order in classes.
• We’ve fixed an issue that was causing data to be lost when copying a selection of variables in our LLDB-based debugger on Windows.
• We’ve implemented a fix for the incorrect rendering of the tuple collection (CPP-21763). In Unreal Engine projects, this is especially critical for the TTuple, TVariant, and TArray types with non-standard allocators.

Fixes for Unreal Engine 5 and others

We’ve quite recently rolled out a significant number of new things, like Rider for Unreal Engine on macOS and support for Unreal Engine 5 Preview. We are delighted to see that so many new users are giving Rider Preview a try, and we are also thrilled by the amount of feedback and the number of bug reports you all have submitted! We’ve even managed to address quite a few of them in this build:

• When opening .uproject with a game based on Unreal Engine 5, a bundled .NET Core will be detected and the correct MSBuild will be selected.
• Multiple fixes for Unreal Engine 5 on macOS.
• Plugins:
  • We’ve improved the UnrealLink plugin for Unreal Engine 5.
  • We’ve improved the startup process for the RiderLink, as well as the process for establishing connection stability.
  • We’ve fixed a number of cases when the “Installing RiderLink” action was showing a blank build panel and nothing was happening.

Make sure you update to UnrealLink plugin v12.

That’s it for today! Take part in our preview and enjoy Unreal Engine development with Rider.

JOIN THE EARLY PREVIEW

The JetBrains Rider team
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