Why build an extension ?

Announcement

Hey guys ! Just wanted to let you know that I need to run some maintenance on the website because of the recent domain name changes from netlify. So, some pages will appear like this for a few days... but guess what's coming new to the pages ? A Dark theme switch !!!

Programming with Unreal engine 4 always has been very macro-heavy. Moreover, due to the sheer number of classes in the engine, the default VSCode intellisense fails to keep up.

Another issue around accessibility to the engine was the lengthy parsing/loading times of VS2017. I remember tinkering with build files just to squeeze a bit of performance back when I had an old laptop. Since then, a lot of improvements have been made to reduce wait times, but to many, the most exciting quality of life improvement was the addition of support for VSCode as an IDE which shipped with 4.18.

However, it never saw mainstream adoption. It was probably due to stigma around Electron being RAM heavy or inconsistency of intellisense. All that is not wrong (by design), BUT... what is also true is VSCode has been THE go-to editor for scripting languages(lua, typescript), extension devs(chrome, firefox) and modern languages(rust, go) due to the debugger, community support and the extensibility.

You can download like 50MB of files and get quite a lot done super efficiently with the right plug-ins.

With many engines incorporating C# and python support in last decade and Epic rumored to be on its way to add a new scripting language and import tools for Blender, I thought it would be pretty cool to have a single swiss-army-knife kind of platform to write code on and VSCode fit the bill.

I started development of this plugin late January 2020. If you are starting out with UE4 C++, learning about engine classes, or don't mind missing auto-completion for a few classes, give this extension a try, tell your friends about it if you like it, maybe support me as a developer, or just hang out at my Discord.

I look forward to hearing your feedback and improving the plug-in...

A large list of FAQ can be found here

Get started with installing the extesnion here...

The full list of features can be found here...

See you later... 🖐