Go beyond the limitations of Visual Studio with Visual Assist’s tailored features and support for Unreal Engine 4 & 5. Experience context-aware suggestions, snappy performance, and minimal loading time even in large game projects.

Turn your vision into reality with tailored support for Unreal Engine

Understand code easily

VA’s parser fully understands the context of Unreal extended code language and adjusts syntax highlighting and indentation accordingly. Annoying tabs, false errors, and unlabeled symbols when declaring UFUNCTIONS and UCLASS are now history.

Get Relevant Hints

Type specifiers rapidly and with less switching to documentation for most U*Macros. If you modify the engine or add new specifiers, Visual Assist will detect and add suggestions for those as well.

Works With Everything Else

Visual Assist reads U*Macro specifiers & we’ve used that to make our features smarter. Goto, Goto Related, Find References, Rename & Change Signature have all been extended to support implicit methods.

Go Beyond Limits

One of the limitations of Visual Studio’s default parser is it struggles in large solutions commonly associated with game development. With Visual Assist, you can code without all the incorrect red squiggles & save memory for other tasks.

Context-Aware Dialogs and Documentation

The documentation for Unreal Engine C++ is often in the code itself. Visual Assist understands Unreal’s extended code language so it will show comments and dialogs from base classes and U*Macro specifiers.

Visual Assist includes features specific to development with Unreal Engine (UE), including support for UE keywords, preprocessor macros, and solution setup.

Enable support for UE in the Game Development option of Visual Assist.

Enabling support changes only the UI of Visual Assist. It does not affect the set of known symbols in a solution. As with non-UE solutions, known symbols are determined by #include directives and project include paths.

The first time you open a UE solution, whether or not support in the UI is enabled, Visual Assist parses a multitude of UE4 engine headers. After that, the symbols are available to all solutions that include them. If you cease all development with UE4, rebuild your symbol database to reclaim disk space and discard knowledge of all UE symbols.

When you select support for UE, you can choose the Always option to enable functionalities for all your projects, or Detect automatically allowing Visual Assist to detect them when you are working on a UE project.

There are different options to parse and index folders containing internal engine plugins from UE:

To not parse and index folders with UE plugins select the None option, this option significantly improves the parse time.
Parse and index folders containing UE plugins that are referenced in the project files or are enabled by default with the Referenced option, this option is selected by default and improves parse time.
Select All to include in the parse and index process folders containing UE internal engine plugins, even plugins your project does not use, this option slows down the parse time.

Parse and index folders containing UE generated header or source files by checking the Index generated code option. Otherwise, they will be skipped, improving parse time. By default, this option is unchecked.

The auto-format feature applies changes on pasted code if it contains one of the following UE macro definitions: UCLASS, USTRUCT, UPROPERTY, UFUNCTION, UENUM, UDELEGATE, GENERATED_UCLASS_BODY, GENERATED_USTRUCT_BODY, GENERATED_UINTERFACE_BODY, or GENERATED_IINTERFACE_BODY. By default, the Disable indent and format on pasted code option is checked. Otherwise, the auto-format feature will not apply changes to the pasted code.

Enable support for shader files such as .USF, .USH, .HLSL, and apply advanced syntax coloring and navigation features.

Also, Enable support for CUDA files such as .CU and .CUH, and apply advanced syntax coloring and navigation features.

Visual Assist features

#1 Open any file (Shift+Alt+O)

Find and open any file in your solution using a simple dialog and a few search tokens.

The example finds filenames with "player" and "swim", without "multi", and opens the selected file at line 1024.

#2 Find any symbol (Shift+Alt+S)

In a dialog that supports similar filtering, find any symbol in your solution.

To become a power user, explore the context menu in this and every dialog of Visual Assist.

#3 Go to implementation (Alt+G)

Despite comparable functionality in Visual Studio, many users rely on Visual Assist to find more definitions and declarations than built-in Intellisense.

Alt+G opens a menu when multiple targets are available.

#4 Go to anything related (Shift+Alt+G)

The big brother of Alt+G can take you just about anywhere related to the current symbol.

Instead of chasing an implementation with successive presses of Alt+G, use Shift+Alt+G to jump into a hierarchy.

From any reference to a class, jump directly to a base or derived class.

#5 Open corresponding file (Alt+O)

Open the file that is most related to the active document.

In C/C++, Alt+O typically opens a corresponding header or source file. Alt+O opens a menu when more than one destination is possible.

Follow Alt+O with Alt+Left-Arrow to return to your original destination.

#6 Find references (Shift+Alt+F)

Although built-in Find References has improved over the years, the version in Visual Assist is still faster, more powerful, and often more complete.

Clone results windows, via icon or context menu, so you can run additional finds without overwriting your initial results.

#7 Quick actions and refactoring menu (Shift+Alt+Q)

Access the features of Visual Assist applicable to the current context with Shift+Alt+Q. The content of the menu varies greatly. Experiment from symbols of different types, expressions, lines, and whitespace.

Adjust spacing and format of the VA Snippets used by the refactoring and code-generation commands in the menu, e.g. Create from Usage and Implement Virtual Methods.

Open the snippet editor via VAssistX | Tools | Edit VA Snippets, then set type to Refactoring.

Disable the floating buttons that open the same menu as Shift+Alt+Q.

#8 List methods in file (Alt+M)

Navigate the current file from a simple drop-down of classes and methods in it. Filter the list using substrings.

Adjust content of the list via the context menu for the tiny down-arrow.

#9 Rename (Shift+Alt+R)

Although built-in Rename is occasionally sufficient, the version in Visual Assist is faster, more powerful, and often more complete.

Rename the definition and declaration of a symbol, all references to it, and optionally, occurrences in comments and strings. A preview of all targets to be renamed is always shown so you are confident the rename does what you expect.

#10 Use VA Hashtags

Add hashtags to comments and navigate among them via tool window (Shift+Alt+H) or go-to command (Shift+Alt+G).

VA Hashtags are effectively bookmarks and tasks that move with your code. Create new hashtags or prepend # to existing keywords, e.g. #John and #TODO. After you navigate using simple VA Hashtags, learn about their advanced functionality.

Quick Navigation;