Visual Studio license for Unreal Engine development in Rider. – Support | JetBrains

Question

Do I need a Visual Studio license to develop Unreal Engine projects (Windows) on Rider?

Answer

In short: Visual Studio license is needed if your UE project contains C++ code, Unreal Engine uses VS toolchain for building.

As soon as your game project contains C++ code, or you wish to use a source build of engine, Visual Studio toolchain is required. You will need to apply a suitable Visual Studio license.

If your project is pure Blueprint (contain no C++ code at all), then you don't need Visual Studio at all. Unreal Engine allows creating and editing pure blueprint projects having no toolchain installed (MSVC build tools, Windows SDK, MSBuild, .Net). However, when it comes to a point that a project should be packaged, the Windows SDK is required. Note: Rider can do nothing with pure blueprint projects, so Rider is also not needed in that case.

At the moment, Rider leverages MSVC to build the Unreal Engine projects on Windows because Unreal Engine itself heavily depends on MSVC. This is unlikely to change in the short term, but we are aware of this issue and we are working on it.

To be more specific, we are currently working on supporting a clang-based toolchain in Rider. Unreal heavily depends on MSVC, so switching to an alternative toolchain is a challenging process. While we made progress in this direction, there is a lot of work to be done to support it properly, and it is challenging to estimate when this feature will be publicly available in Rider.

In short:

•You do need a proper Visual Studio license to use Rider with Unreal Engine projects on Windows.

• We have plans to support an alternative toolchain, but we cannot guarantee ETA at this time.

Note: Visual Studio Community has its own license terms and limitations. There are different terms for individual users and for organization employees. If you meet appropriate terms, you can use VS Community.

The instructions describing exact tools that need to be installed can be found here: What external tools needs to be installed to work with Unreal Engine projects in Rider