Unreal Engine C++ Project Setup, From Scratch

[@jordanabbatiello]

Hey, I made a port of your snippets for vscode, do you want to make this available to your community?

[@AlexForsythe]

Sure, thanks for doing that and I'm glad you found them worth porting! If you want to publish a vscode extension and leave a comment with the link and/or details, I'll gladly pin that comment.

[@jordanabbatiello]

@@AlexForsythe Sure thing, I've got it on my github right now github.com/pseuplex/vscode-unreal-snippets I'll work on publishing an extension. Also, ull has been saving my life...

[@arielgimenez_95]

@@jordanabbatiello Could you make a video, it doesn't matter if it doesn't have audio, showing the procedure to use it? ... thanks

[@duskpierce7802]

@@jordanabbatiello thank you for the port!

[@RaduButarascu]

I will try to adapt this workflow with VS Code. Does anyone have the link to the extension mentioned?

[@robink2006]

THIS is the Gold Standard of video tutorials. Very, very good. Thank you.

[@workflowinmind]

100% agree

[@user-cw3nb8rc9e]

VERY bad style. not very good. the opposite.

[@HonsHon]

​@@user-cw3nb8rc9e Very good style. Very very good. The opposite

[@DoctorMGL]

alongside that great tutorial i can listen to that deep relaxing voice all day in combination with your direct way of explaining that i only see in high class education system , not what we see in typical random videos on youtube were the person is stuttering and playing around the bush before going to a point that could be explained in a 1 min but the guy doing a 20 minute video for it, clear , detailed , well managed , categorized , and straight to the point without wasting time , thats what i like , keep doing that you got my support

[@alejandromunoz8086]

The quality of the video is amazing in every field. Congratulations

[@CoiledTortoise]

This is such a good explanation of all the project artefacts. Thank you so much for taking the (considerable) time to put this together. Getting a "bare-bones" and what feels like a clean set of just the required really artefacts really does help de-mystify all the files you see when you first open an unreal project for the first time.

[@koichikagehira654]

Timestamps for mobile users: 0:00 - Introduction 1:18 - Text Editor & Terminal 2:04 - Installing Unreal 2:46 - Installing Visual Studio 6:17 - Conventional Workflow 8:34 - Sublime Text Setup 9:04 - Manual Project Creation 14:31 - Building Editor Binaries 17:17 - Running from Editor Binaries 19:03 - Building a Standalone Game 19:47 - Cooking Content 21:39 - Quick Command-Line Scripts 23:43 - Workflow Example: TestActor 26:03 - Sublime Workflow Tips 28:30 - Review

[@paganite]

this is insanely good content, best, most clear information I've seen about UE since I started working with it, please keep making more videos

[@CretinousFiend]

Thanks for making this. It made me excited to learn Unreal and coding in general. I wish you'd continue to make content! Theres a wide margin between the quality and content of your videos and the others out there.

[@philippec7213]

Since 6 months I have problems to use UE and C++ and with your video in 30mn all my problems are solved : THANK YOU ! 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

[@unreolog8699]

I think that each of your last videos is brilliant. I haven't seen such detailed and exhaustive videos about UE before. I would like to see more. Please keep going!

[@krisitak]

I got into build systems recently and it wasn't easy to obtain information on how things work as far as Unreal Engine is concerned. Alex, your channel is a blessing! The structure and editing of your videos are extremely valuable.

[@HonsHon]

You have a really good voice for this stuff. Feels like I am hearing the world's most important process being explained in great detail. Love it.

[@drakouzdrowiciel9237]

Great job of breaking down the complexities.

[@kameenavery9616]

This was a fascinating video. To see how you could build from scratch without even needing the Launcher...... Then there is all the snippet functionality My GOODNESS, I really want to learn more about this eve nif this video is over 2 years old. Great video and I will definitely pass it along.

[@ravnor874]

Im a student who have started a group of fresh people to slowly start a game studio. I also have ADD. Next to no coding experience, all we learned the two years i studied game development they taught us C#, and i picked up a little on Blueprint. Your other video about C++ and BP coding made me realise i gotta learn some c++ aswell so i watched this. My ADD plus no experience with coding like this made me just sit her with the feeling of constantly getting mindblowned and losing focus. Super nice video! So hoped I understood more haha

[@mstram]

Great video Alex ! No "fluff", professionally presented. I have only been using Unreal for 4 days, and it only took me 2 days to find your channel :) I love seeing how the "bare metal" of an UR cpp project is constructed. I also watched your "The Unreal Engine Game Framework: From int main() to BeginPlay" which again was great. Ironically, my interest in Unreal is based on an idea I have had for "awhile" now, which is to illustrate / make a movie ... who knows what else.. on how the internals of a cpu works. Think of "anthropomorphized bits, bytes, control units, and hard drives" ;)

[@mstram]

Just wish you also had a text version of all the code you input. I manually transcribed it from the video, sometimes using the Windows Magnifier app :/

[@Dayogg]

I would like to thank you for showing this way of working, I absolutely love it.

[@babichfx]

I’m crying, man. Thank you!

[@naseemgharibi]

man this guy is the best teacher ever, THANK YOU!

[@dexgarvey]

Excellent work. I'd forgotten how much I miss the command line's efficiency when your processor is dedicated to crunching code rather than maintaining a visual extravaganza.

[@alirezaahani-f4u]

this video deserve 1 billion comments and likes and subs

[@RandomGuyyy]

I persevered and I think this is my new workflow for UE C++. Excellent stuff.

[@olgaboro8400]

Thank you so much. Your video has helped me greatly. Finally able to build unreal projects and actually understand it at least a bit

[@abghen2323]

I dont understand any of this but I did enjoy just listening to it. Maybe I'll look back after I take my first programming courses in school and learn something.

[@RTSun-lx7ee]

Man, it's really valuable video because you give basic introduction about unreal build system. Only I wish there are alternative videos for GNU/Linux or Mac OS.

[@sf851]

Hi @Alex Forsythe, I usually don't comment that much on KZbin video. You have done such a good job here that I can't resist congratulating you. Thank you again for this mine of knowledge. I'm looking forward to see your next videos.

[@jagt]

I can't express how I appreciate this video. Wish you can make a new on on the whole UE4 package/uasset things. It's the most confusing part to me. I can't even imagine how some one get that explained.

[@christofstanits]

your videos are as smooth as your voice! glorious content with exactly the right amount of humor and zero waste of time!

[@BillyLemonZest]

Incredible work. Thank you so much for the time and effort you put in. I foresee this channel growing quickly.

[@vexedev]

Man this is awesome! You're right on the spot with VS. After years of using it professionally I got so fed up with it I made my own editor. With this video I now know how to configure it to build for Unreal, thank you!

[@ricanteja]

Funny finding you here! Love your Handmade Hero highlight videos. Cheers!

[@Alex0vSky]

I was so impressed and decided to develop a command line tool to create projects, do you want to make this available to your community? The tool uses the "Ue" core for generation, but does not load the user interface. Templates are also supported.

[@Gostronyx]

Best content, Best delivery, Best Pace. Thank you very much for this.

[@mareknetzel]

This is Pure Gold! Thank you Alex for making these videos!

[@OthnielCundangan]

Thank you for this video, it gave me a lot of understanding of how the unreal build system works. The editor is really crap when trying to generate C++ classes in subfolders and I was encountering some errors that I could only fix after I actually understood what was happening. Turns out I had to put the files under /Public/ in order for it to work in the editor correctly.

[@bjornmansson5641]

Fantastic! Couldn't have asked for a better breakdown. I hope you find the possibility to put out ue4/5 online courses in the future. I'd definitely pay money for this kind of quality content.

[@partialdata]

Give this man a Epic MegaGrant!

[@VincentBlankfield]

Thanks man! This video is pure gold! It answers all the hopeless questions I've had about UE4 in one go. Saving it to use as a reference in the future. I didn't even realize it was possible to untie UE4 from VS on Windows. Now the project structure and build process is absolutely clear to me. I wonder if it is possible to go even further and use gcc or clang instead of msvc on Windows...

[@Rydn]

I want to say, I love the content of your channel. The work and love shines through. Thank you.

[@Travio247]

This is a great video, going to give it a whirl when I'm home on Sublime, having alot of issues with intellisense for VS2022

[@un0RRS]

This is a dope work flow. I'm gonna use it to learn game programming. Thanks much.

[@turannuraliyev6631]

In my case it was necessary to add , "Plugins": [ { "Name": "ModelingToolsEditorMode", "Enabled": true, "TargetAllowList": [ "Editor" ] } ] to .uproject file to be able to open the project in editor. Great content anyway!

[@robc5877]

Sloppy whitespace ♥ Great video. For Subl veterans / workflow & devops geeks this is perfect - and the basics still work / are current. Thank you. ps. time for a 2024 redo? Some folks made some project generators for UE and other neat fancy stuff + testing could also use a plug (other people already said the same, i know, but it's a perfect next step for the workflow, maybe also some bits about vcs + containers to automate some stuff, crazy i know - but it's fun!). Thanks again.

[@ydvisual5530]

Hey thanks Alex, good stuff. I am trying to do this for unreal engine 5, the new preview release. There are few small differences, but it works well, thanks !

[@leonlysak4927]

What are the differences? I'm trying to do this on Unreal Engine 5 right now

[@ollytomlinsonmusic]

Even though I'm not a programmer, I found this very interesting, and this is a very good video.

[@pete5084]

I wish I could be this man one day

[@mattalorio]

This was fantastic. Also liked Sublime Text pointers.

[@Sluggernaut]

The only part of this video I would disagree with is where you make the actor child class from scratch. I would personally have Unreal generate that class. I would like to add the caveat that I didnt even know you could do 90% of the stuff shown in this video. This was absolutely fascinating and mind blowing. I didnt know you could make a project like this. I'm really impressed that Unreal will even do this, for one. For two, I'm surprised anyone knows about all of this. Also, there are plugins for Unreal that assist with Intellisense and help the developer. I am on the Engine Team at a AAA studio and get into the engine code every day and I need to be able to #include headers all of the time. Previously I had to start with a full path, copied from the headers properties, then cut it down to a reasonable string. Not I use Visual Assist to do the work. Pretty nice. This really is the gold standard to which all tutorials should live by. Very nice.

[@RaduButarascu]

This was an EXTRAORDINARY tutorial! Thank you for creating it!

[@TheRabidCabbage]

This video was quite insightful. I followed it on the latest Unreal 5.0.3, and apart from a few obvious things like changing "EngineAssociation" to "5.0" and using "UnrealEditor.exe" instead of UE4Editor.exe", it all went off without a hitch. I added the correct versions of .NET, MSVC, SDK Etc, from the 5.0 release notes, but I don't think they were being used, since I already had newer versions installed. But it didn't seem to affect the outcome. I certainly don't see how this could ever replace my Rider workflow, but it's nice to have a better understanding of what's going on. And that Cmder is a nice addition to my arsenal.🙂

[@reismorgan7815]

CAn you help me understand why the only snippets available to me are uuproj and lorem even tho ive added many more to my user packages/app data packages folders?

[@thoeme]

I would love to give more than one thumbs up for that video!

[@YawLighthouse]

This video is fantastic! You definitely convinced me to get sublime if it means I can get to files and lines of code faster(VS has been killing me lately with just opening files)... I would like to ask if in the future will you be explaining how the Unreal Build Tool generally works? Or at least an overview because its like dark magic that I cant seem to figure out how to see each step of the process for compiling code to run the editor or building and cooking the game, and the documentation on it is a little vague for somebody who doesn't primarily work in dev ops or infrastructure...

[@citadelo5ricks]

Visual Studio Code 1.54.2, UE4.26, Mac 10.15.7. Setup: install Intellisense, set Intelli Sense Engine to "Tag Parser". Fast, efficient and actually MORE ACCURATE. Works great for inspecting UE source.

[@Monkok3D]

Cool! But how do you resolve the "Include file not found in browse.path." Help needed!

[@citadelo5ricks]

@@Monkok3D Have not been using lately, sorry. All I can recall is that it's a lot of trickery to get browse path into the right variable.

[@ElliotMurphy]

This video is fantastic, thank you for laying the parts out like that, and for your appeal to decency!

[@toddcarter4829]

This video certainly isn't for me, I'm not a beginner I have even less knowledge of coding. This video is very well done. I kinda understand more than I did but this is far above me. Very well done Alex!

[@adamodimattia]

I am hooked. This content is of extraordinary value!

[@nickjones8460]

This is a great resource. I imagine it took a long time to edit the video this well. Thanks!

[@deffuls]

I love this setup. Thank You

[@W3Studios]

Nicely put together and executed. Finally, videos where we don't need to watch each click!

[@220damien]

Just wow....Hearing you makes Unreal engine a piece of cake to understand. I really do like your workflow, but i don't see myself using it ( for now at least), being not a good at writing c++ for unreal. So i would like to ask you about a roadway that you find best to become good at c++ for unreal.

[@thegermancoder]

That video was so awesome! You are breathtaking!

[@downdiggi]

Alex, thanks for this video. I'm learning a whole bunch!

[@Ertie]

Such badass content omg, props on your quality and understanding

[@fizzypopvfx]

The dragging of the dockable views in VS at 0.33 made me laugh a great deal. Excellent vid series this, esp as a dev coming to unreal, it's been perfect.

[@AlyxCouch]

Awesome video! Weird question, whats your wallpaper?

[@falxonPSN]

Good video to see the details of project creation. That said, I find using Visual Assist and disabling Intellisense gives me the most benefit. Fast but also full syntax completion and refactoring tools.

[@carlwong1919]

Such a high quality tutorial.

[@VladyVeselinov]

The audio is soo crisp

[@charnet3d207]

his voice reminds me of jerryrigeverything :D

[@downdiggi]

Alex, you're a very decent human being. 🤣🤣 Thanks again for this awesome video. I can't express how much you've taught me in this short comment, but a lot. I'm looking forward to the next one. Stay blessed.

[@DamirH]

Great video but it does skip out on the most crucial part of it all - debugging. How would one go about breakpoints and stepping through execution?

[@AlexForsythe]

When I need to do extensive debugging work, I still use Visual Studio (with UE4.natvis installed) as my debugger of choice. If you really want a fast, oldschool alternative, you can use WinDbg.exe (installed with the Windows 10 SDK, in %PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Windows Kits\10\Debuggers\x64) - it's got a bit of a learning curve, though.

[@jdigi78]

Love this, explained a lot of things I didn't know enough about to even begin searching for online. One question though, what are your thoughts on rider? Seems like a good middle ground between vs and your setup shown in the video.

[@liuyixuan101]

Thanks for you video, it really helps me a lot.

[@hamol3d]

Excellent work. Gold!

[@ThatGuy001]

Hi Alex, thank you for creating this tutorial. I hope this can also help me with the unreal game development on linux too

[@GonziHere]

Hi, I love how your content is presented and how insightful and helpful it actually is. Thank you for taking the time to set it up. That aside, how do you work with UE source? I've managed to build from source and use that in my pet project, but I don't fully grasp when would I actually change the source instead of just using module. Maybe tangential to this, I've encountered opinions about "tossing UE gameplay framework aside" several times and I assume that you might know why and how would one go about doing that? (I would like to make RTS one day and I feel like the UE assumes many things that aren't really optimal for that).

[@archiep9162]

Great rundown 10/10!

[@yunus5949]

WONDERFUL EXPLANATIONS, HEY DUDE, THAT IS AWESOME! Are there any tutorials on other platforms?

[@giorgilataria8164]

please make a course on unreal c++ game developement using c++ and blueprints interchangably as you have a video on that

[@zeffster2]

this is so awesome, thank you

[@DariuszMakowski]

This is truly incredible content. I love it!, UE5 ? I've notice du didnt make much content over past 2 years... what happen ? O.O Need moar!!!

[@sgtbooz]

First off great tutorial and thanks for putting the effort on the quality. Kudos! Second, do we really need to create a New Project with Project Manager if we are just traversing an existing Project's code ? I mean it does copy duplications of stuff around doesn't it ? or am I missing something ?

[@varunverma95]

Okay so I was following till 16:45 when I enter the command to build , it throws an error "ERROR WHILE ENUMERATING VISUAL STUDIO TOOLCHAINS". Now how can I get past this?

[@FraztheWizard]

Amazing, Thankyou!

[@boyuanli7843]

Why does this amazing vid recv only 700 like. Great content!

[@douglaslassance]

This is an amazing video, demystifying the build system is all I needed. Side note, I was wondering why you are not mentioning linters such as cpplint. Are you not really into them?

[@romantroshkin3142]

Godlike tutorials (in a Dota voice)

[@OmerFarukGonen]

@AlexForsythe can you show how to debug as well ?

[@opnuul]

wew using 181818 for the bg in that part were you had that diagram for how everything works at the end was other worldly with this dark youtube theme. also cool video i am making a game rn with unity but also it's my first go at this kind of thing and maybe there is some unreal in my future. cool workflow.

[@john.mattock]

Thanks for the tutorial. Is this your natural voice?

[@toddeburch]

Nice video. Alex you could moonlight as a professional voice actor-books on tape for example!

[@valterbushido3468]

Really good one!

[@CodeBoyyy]

You Amazing Alex! Thank you alot...

[@YourComputer]

Maybe I've missed something, but how'd you get a default map with skylight and stuff when you had selected no starter content?

[@TomanovicsGergely]

Found this video a few months ago and the methods described here became my everyday workflow, now came back for those useful tips at the end of the video and to say thank you for this. :D Just one question: sometimes when I start compiling with the build.bat file, the compiler throws an error, like the [project_name]aCore.dll file can't be accessed or something like this. When I wait a few seconds and run build.bat again, it works fine... And it works fine around 9 of 10 tries, but not always. Have you also encountered this error?

[@enonemasta]

What do you think about JetBrains Rider for UE4?

[@card00r]

This may be a silly question but you don't use Sublime Text as an IDE for UE, right? Surely VS debug functionality and many other features would make it more valuable in a UE project than Sublime (as an IDE). You 'just' use Sublime for its added build functionality as well as translation unit navigation.

[@Arion661]

Super nice mic quality!

[@pauloviniciuscoral1128]

This is gold

[@lyowin]

For some reason, when building project UE (4.27) ignored the Private folder, after moving files from there to Core folder everything seems to work as shown What might be the problem?

[@PabitraPadhy]

Thank you so much for making this. - Decent Human Being Always use sublime, like you said it doesn't get in the way + superfast. Although Rider for Unreal Engine would help a lot, that's not free, but it's really good. Your sublime packages would help a lot. Thanks again for the detailed explanation.

[@zombi1034]

I followed this tutorial step by step and now all my files on my computer are gone😭😭 but now I know how to build an unreal project from scratch🥳