A Year of C++ Game Development Improvements in Visual Studio

Jason Chlus

David Li

Game development is evolving rapidly and keeping up with the latest trends is crucial. I’m thrilled that David Li took the time to highlight all the improvements added to Visual Studio for game developers during 2023. Check out his blog here. 

The Unreal Engine integrations are where my eyes jumped to first. There is now an Unreal Engine log viewer, macro auto-formatter, naming convention checker, blueprint reference and asset inspector, test adaptor, and more, directly in Visual Studio. There is also an exciting image watch extension for UE projects that helps you view in-memory bitmaps while debugging C++ code. 

I was also happy to see some nice quality of life improvements like sticky scroll, brace pair colorization, the new spell checker, size alignment of types, and copy/paste with correct indentation to name a few. There were also some major productivity improvers such as all-in-one search, memory layout visualization, include cleanup, HLSL support, and the file comparison window. 

David sheds light on work being done to further improve debugging, performance and cross platform development as well. Go check out David’s full blog post to learn more about the advancements being made in Visual Studio for game developers. Together, let’s continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible for game development and empower creators to turn their dreams into reality. 

All of these features and more are now available on the recently released Visual Studio 17.9 

Thank you for providing feedback to help build these features. Please continue sharing feedback on Twitter (@VisualC) or through tickets on Developer Community.

Happy coding! 

Jason Chlus Program Manager, Visual Studio

Follow

David Li Game Dev Product Manager, Visual C++

Follow