3 Webinars on Game Development With Unity and Unreal Engine – Recordings Available
The recordings for Three Webinars on Game Development, with JetBrains Developer Advocate Matt Ellis, are now available on YouTube.
Here are some stats about this webinar series that we wanted to share:
- We hosted 12 webinar sessions in total, including 3 tracks in 4 languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The webinars in Asia had subtitles, and we want to express our gratitude to our hosts who allowed for better communication between Matt and the viewers.
- 1,463 people registered for the 3 webinars on game development.
- With 3,766 views, the most popular webinar was “Creating Games With Unity: Scripting Logic With Rider”.
- Over 80 questions were answered during the Q&A sessions.
- 18 Rider 1-year licenses were raffled off.
Q&A highlights
The following are some of the most popular questions from our Q&A sessions:
What are the advantages of JetBrains IDEs compared with others for game development?
Rider is designed to be a single IDE for all game development needs, with bundled support for Unity and Unreal Engine and a plugin for Godot. We’ve been developing innovative solutions to support game engines since 2017, such as inspections based on Unity’s best practices and even a feature that highlights when you’re calling expensive Unity APIs from Update methods.
We also index your game’s assets, so we can show you where your code is used in Unity assets or Unreal Blueprints, and we can display the values of serialized fields in the editor. The key idea is to make it so you no longer have to swap from the IDE to the game editor and back to see whether there are problems. We’ll bring the warnings directly into the editor as you type. We have many innovative ideas, and there’s always more to come.
What are the plans for the next release of Rider (2023.1)?
You can learn more about them here.
Are there any differences between Rider’s support for Unreal and its support for Unity?
There are differences, because they are different game engines, but there are many similarities too. For example, Rider for Unreal Engine will index Blueprints and show serialized data and function usage directly in the editor, and Rider for Unity does the same thing with scenes and other assets. Rider will also show the log for both Unreal Engine and Unity, with links you can click to navigate to files. You can run unit tests in both engines and control play mode. Unity has better support for debugging on the consoles in Rider, which is something we want to improve for Unreal too. But we need help from the console vendors, so please speak to your account representatives and let them know that you’d like to see better console support in Rider.
Are there any plans for Rider to be able to launch and debug games on consoles, such as Xbox?
This is something we’d love to support, but it requires access to dev kits and help from the console vendors, so please contact your account representatives and let them know that this is something you’d like to see in Rider.
Does Rider support Unreal Engine 5?
Yes, it supports Unreal Engine 4 and 5.
What’s new in Rider for Unreal?
If Unreal Engine is already running, you can use the new Attach to Unreal action to automatically attach the debugger. This is much easier than using the Attach to Process dialog.
We have also updated the Code Vision links for Blueprints, and you can now see a usage count for functions. We’ve also added a Rename refactoring with core redirect, so if you rename a function that’s used in a Blueprint, Rider will save a “redirect” in the DefaultEngine.ini file, and your existing saved data won’t break
We’ve implemented several other useful features and fixes, including a small change to the Generate GUID dialog, which will show the GUID in the Unreal format.
Who needs RiderFlow?
All Unity users – level designers, game designers, artists, as well as coders! Basically anyone who uses the Unity editor will benefit from using RiderFlow. It is designed to bring the kind of productivity tools we build for code in our IDEs to the Unity editor.
How is it different from Rider?
As an IDE, Rider is designed for working with code, with super fast navigation, code completion, and smart features like inspections and safe refactorings that make rewriting your code far safer than just using Find and replace.
RiderFlow is a productivity tool for the Unity Editor that’s designed for the whole team, not just the coders. It will help you organize your scene hierarchy, add notes and to-dos, quickly jump to favorite or “in progress” objects with bookmarks, and swap between different camera presets.
We want to bring some of the IDE’s smart features into the editor, like refactorings – automated, mechanical changes to your code. Here, however, we want to make those changes to the scene, replacing objects while maintaining their positions, transforms, and so on.
And of course, there’s even a code editor in there for quick edits. If you need to do anything more significant, Rider will help you.
What are the future plans for RiderFlow? Will the current features be maintained or will new features continue to be developed?
We want to bring various fixes for Unity 2022.2. We want to reduce the size of the backend again; now at just about 130 MB, it is about one third of the previous size. We will make it easier to open the code editor, for example by allowing you to open it from the script inspector context menu. There will also be a button to open code in an external editor such as Rider, and camera presets will no longer preserve the state of the isometric/perspective toggle.
All feedback is useful for our team. If you have anything to say about RiderFlow or have suggestions for features you’d like us to implement, we encourage you to contact us in the comments below or via email.
If you watched the videos, please feel free to share any thoughts you may have in the comments below. Your feedback will help us make our future webinars even better.
Subscribe to a monthly digest curated from the .NET Tools blog:
