Build Unreal Engine Games In C++ Faster

ever wanted to write your own game and did you know that you could write it in visual studio with ease find out more on this episode of Visual Studio toolbox [Music] hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Visual Studio toolbox I'm your host Leslie Richardson and today I'm excited because we're gonna be talking about video games today so joining me is David Lee from the C plus team who's going to be sharing how we can all be more productive developing games in digital studio with C plus plus hey David hey Leslie how's it going I'm good how are you doing great I'm super excited to show everyone some of these Unreal Engine Integrations that we have been building in Visual Studio sweet so before we dive in would you care to tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you typically work on of course so um as you said before I am in the C plus plus team uh I am the game developer product manager in visual studio so everything from building games in Visual Studio to msvc compiler for all of you watching um just send me a tweet my my Twitter handle is there at the CBP PPM for any feedback so yeah awesome right so video games very popular Topic in the development world I know a lot of people initially started coding just because they wanted to write their own games and stuff so can you tell us a little bit more about um you know how developing video games can have its challenges and maybe what using visual studio and C plus can do to alleviate some of that yeah Leslie um I've chatted with quite a lot of game developers out there and really understand their needs so from in the developers to students to all of our first party game developers and you know as more I learned in our lessons a lot of pains have circuits from game development I think one of the biggest things that I've heard is the mental task switching a lot of developers out there when they work on a game whether it's using their proprietary engine or um or Unreal Engine sometimes they have to switch back and forth between visual studio and you know each time you open up the unreal editor switch back to visual studio and then close it that takes time and instead of having a smooth flowing um work then you're you give a lot of unnecessary mental energy by getting distracted and not be as productive so this is one of the few things that the team at C plus plus in Visual Studio has set out to tackle awesome yeah I I can relate I did write like one video game in college and specifically I was using a combo of unity and I think IntelliJ at the time and it's just having to jump between those back and forth neither were like seamlessly incorporated into the other was definitely time consuming especially when your game is a buggy mess and you're trying to deal with that you know yeah would you care to show us how Visual Studio can save the day in that sense and you talk about unreal which is going to be the focus for today right yes so today we're going to be focused on Unreal Engine specific features that we have built in visual studio um just to give everyone a brief overview we'll be going over how to see if blueprint references in visual studio um there we have added code analysis we have added Unreal Engine lock streaming so all those things you don't have to keep going to the Unreal Engine editor for um including adding a class there's a few templates out there um so quite a lot of features that we're introducing in Visual Studio 2022 17.5 with some of the features currently in preview in 17.6 preview 1. um yeah to get started um I definitely want to show everyone how to enable these features so one of the things that is absolutely needed for uh for you to see on blueprint references is the visual studio integration tool um it is an Unreal Engine plugin so here I'm going to show you two steps to get your sources so one is from GitHub we have open sources plug-in on GitHub so we welcome Community to contribute to this extension and you can if your project has a custom Unreal Engine or um if the marketplace installer doesn't work um this is the way to get um get your features working so the simplest way is there's a whole bunch of instructions so you're going to read me but basically you just clone this extension make sure the plugin is enabled in numero engine and you should be all set to go now for most of you out there um you might find installing it through the Unreal Engine Marketplace a little bit easier so in the Unreal Engine Marketplace the tool is called Visual Studio integration tool is published on Microsoft and all you gotta do is download and we support um a real 4.27 and the newest revenge of 5 versions so once you've downloaded this um you go to your unreal editor and make sure you enable this integration tool um for if you have any issues whatsoever we do have a troubleshooting page so it's on the GitHub there's this troubleshooting section and there are some common steps you can take to basically diagnose any potential issues you might run into so without further Ado let me switch over to visual studio so Leslie have you played with Unreal Engine before I have not I'm more of a Unity person or I've been more of a Unity person in the past yeah I I am by no means a game developer I know a little bit on my own time um but I think one of the things that we heard from our developers is um blueprints is a virtual scripting language you can use to build your game um with bigger production games eventually you want to migrate those blueprints to actual C plus plus code um for example you can prototype something really quick in Blueprints and when you find out the thing works um you ask your devs or yourself to refactor and remove the blueprint and previously the only way to see your blueprints was to open up the Unreal Engine editor um and go and search for your blueprints here we have added some koblin's hits so you can see right here class lyricame API by the way this is one of the unreal sample projects once you click on blueprint references you'll get a list of blueprints and their Associated asset packs that's awesome so before you just had to go back into the Unreal Engine and just double check um what group what blueprints in there correct area paths that you needed exactly yeah if you um you had to wait which you know it's not good to wait so if you see These Blueprints and they have Associated asset paths you can actually double click on them and see your asset information so here we have some properties uh with different categories um you know you can collapse them you can sort you can even filter out what you want to see so here's a list of all the things if this list gets too long um so this is a great way to reference um your blueprint usages without going to the armo editor that's awesome I love I'm loving the integration definitely not having to swap between two different pieces of software in this case yeah so before we um talk about another feature I want to show that if you might need to refresh your blueprints to do so is under the project menu and here rescan blue UD blueprint for your starting name all right so which is your your data and stuff I'm sorry does that just refresh your data like have you updated and um unreal while you have this blueprint yeah I'll refresh to if we do that um so another thing I wanted to show you is we added some code analysis into um into Visual Studio um this first round of code analysis leverages the unreal header tool which here it's basically a tool that is used one billion Unreal Engine game um let's say you make some mistakes and you don't even call this super important on real macro um once you hit save the color analysis are run the unreal header tool and give you some hints of why things are not working so here you can see purple Squid goes it says unreal header tool unknown specifier so there before you even compile you can see to save you some time that this is not the right thing right this super important macro for example it says expected and a generated body functioning at the start of the class that's because I commented out but you know typically you might make some mistakes that not catch until compile time analysis is designed to save your time so the next feature that I want to show you is also in this whole realm of oh let's not rely on the unreal editor I just want to stay in Visual Studio in this next um feature that I want to show you is the UE lock streaming so now you don't even have to go look inside your unaro editor for any logs um in this line 543 I've added a UE lock to capture every time we shoot the weapon um you have some log taxes so let's run this and boot up the game yeah so while that's building I mean it is really nice to just to see little things like just being able to check your logs in visual studio and all these other things you're just not constantly swapping back and forth right right going back to the um the assets page like when you double clicked on a blueprint it displayed all the data related to the blueprint can you or are there plans to if not already are there plans to be able to update your data via that window um they're not current plans um I think typically the you don't need to refresh that many times um but um if the community wants it we will build it awesome cool here's the unreal editor building up all right now we're in the game Let's Play and try to win this game oh no that was quick actually so let's go back to video studio um as you can see here um different now there's a new window called UE log preview here we can have two options for you um with all the logs that's generated throughout your entire game you can now filter it um remember we the log we added is log Lara ability system unselect everything select this and then look every time I shot it says PPP and of course if you want to see more of the logs you can also check this verbosity option to really display what whatever you need yeah that is really um this really Nifty definitely just to have your typical console logs and stuff all in one spot like you know you're already using a lot of vlogging to debug chances are so making sure it's all in one spot instead of having to add the extra time it takes to again go back to unreal and if you um if you for some reason close the window and you can find it um it's in view other windows and UE lock so if you click this then you can see the login excellent um so let's let's talk about another thing that I have learned with um when talking to um all the unreal developers is a real engine has a lot of complicated macros um I'm real engine there's unique macros everywhere but previously you can have a macro for example something like this a u-function you have to remember every um all the parameters you need to put in but now if you hover over this we have we have added macro expansion and when you say macros can you explain what you mean by that yeah these macros are um instead of typical functions um Unreal Engine uses um a bunch of heavy macros one by line um in order to achieve a lot of a lot of things more quickly than you know writing lines and lines of code awesome so this is an example of a pretty complicated macro that previously um you weren't able to see the entirety of it so now you can either expand online or copy so you can paste it to another um their editor window and so you don't have to remember all the things that it needs for example see your function we have some of the other maybe you property macro so these are the macro expansions that we have added um the last thing I want to show you is um how's it out of class and now we've been on Unreal Engine 5 for quite a while um let's switch over to a Unreal Engine 4 project so the classic action RPG you can see all of the um all the features here work you can see your blueprints you can see um your app get information but you can also add class once again we heard from developers it used to be that you have to open up the unreal editor add a specific C plus plus class and then open up visual studio again but now you can right click on your solution Explorer add UE class and we have provided four templates for you to choose from so for example if I add I want to want to add a new part let's just say my Pawn click add um you can see the path information once you click OK because studio will generate that template file for you um in both the C plus and the header files so file modification detected we click reload all and now if you see in the solution Explorer my pawn and cpp.mypawn.h awesome yeah so so dang you even had to create your classes via unreal first before uh playing around with them in BS yeah um a lot of the things I showed everyone today was only achievable in the unreal order but yeah unreal like once and that was just to play the the game so that's really exciting just to be able to stick to one spot right yeah so I think this is all the features that we have today um the team is working hard to build uh more and more of unreal integration into visual studio so if you have a great idea please let us know on developer Community or you can even trade at me well great so if people want to go learn more about how you can get started writing your own C plus games or using the Unreal Engine within Visual Studio you can get started with all the links that we're posting Below in the description so take a look at that and start making your own games yeah there is um a block that I've wrote I'm describing in more detail about holidays Integrations um that is now available in digital Studio good stuff well David thank you so much for being on the show I can't wait to see what comes next for game development and C plus plus and how it just integrates itself into Visual Studio that's really exciting and yeah thanks think again David thanks Leslie I'm happy to be here sweet and thanks for joining us audience and with that happy gaming and happy coding [Music] thank you foreign

Azure Application Insights Profiler

>> Diagnosing your performance issues with your apps that are already in production may not be the greatest thing in the world, but have no fear because Azure has got you covered with the Azure Application Insights tool. Learn more on this episode of Visual Studio Toolbox. [MUSIC] >> Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm your host, Leslie Richardson, and today, I am joined by Principal Software Engineering Manager, Chuck Weininger, who is a member of the DevDiv Azure Services Team. Welcome, Chuck. >> Hello, Leslie. Thank you. >> Thanks for coming. Today, we're going to be talking specifically about Azure Application Insights. Can you tell us more about what that is? >> Yeah. Application Insights is application monitoring features within Azure that allow you to collect data about your application while it's running. The Profiler is an advanced feature of Application Insights that lets you collect performance data about your application while it's running in production. As you know, with apps running in the Cloud, it can be really hard to get debugging data about those applications. You can't just put a debugger on them. You can't just run a Profiler on them whenever you want, unless you're using our service, which we run the Profiler for you and collect that data and upload it to our service and make it available for you through Application Insights. >> Cool. That's really interesting. Just the whole space of profiling, I feel like that's a subject that a lot of people are aware of, but don't quite use or learn up on until it's imperative, so something's going wrong while the apps already out in production. >> Yeah, it's very true. A lot of times, users are like, "Oh, I have a performance issue. What do I do? How do I look into this? It happened yesterday. How do I find out why and what I can do to fix it?" That's the cool thing about our Profilers. You can turn it on today and just let it run. It'll be collecting data in the background and it'll have that data ready for you when you have a problem that you want to investigate. It does so in a way that's not intrusive to your app. It doesn't change your app code at all. It runs out of proc. For Window services, it's collecting ETW traces, which is a Windows eventing, and getting call stacks from that data. By default, it runs a couple minutes an hour, so it's not running all the time. It's just a sampling Profiler. We're hoping that over a period of time, it'll collect the relevant data that you need to debug your application. >> That's cool. I like that you can leave it on in the background and go about the rest of your dev work that you need to do. Sweet. >> Yeah. Why don't I show you how to enable it and start collecting this data? >> Yeah, sounds good. >> This is an application that we have that demonstrates the Profiler. It's an Azure App Service, which is the easiest way to use the Profiler. We have a real simple switch to turn it on and off, which I'll show here in a minute. But for this App Service, you can go to the "Application Insights" tab. If you have Application Insights enabled for your app, it'll look like this. It shows the Application Insights is turned on, and if it's not enabled, you can enable it here. But then you'll see this Profiler section, and you can turn the Profiler on and off. As you can see for this app, we have the Profiler on. When the Profiler's on, like I said, it's collecting data a little bit every hour. The hope is that over a period of time, all kinds of requests will be coming into your application during those couple minutes an hour, and you'll hopefully get some long-running requests and you can see what's happening, why those are taking a long time. Once you've got it on, you can go to your App Insights resource by clicking the "View Data" at the top. This takes you to the actual Application Insights resource. I'm in a different resource now than before. I've gone from my App Service to App Insights. The Profiler is part of the performance features of App Insights. This is the performance blade for Application Insights, and there's a lot of information on this blade that I'll get to in a little bit. But the first thing you can do is hit the "Profiler" button at the top. This is our configuration page or Profiler homepage. This allows you to set some different properties about the Profiler. We have triggers, which I'll show you here, and this is a list of profiling sessions that have happened. This app's been running for a long time and been collecting profiling traces every day for a long time, and it lists those here. But at the top is some information about the Profiler or settings about the Profiler that you can set. The first one is "Profile Now". If I click that button, it will start profiling right now in my service. This is really cool if you're doing some testing. You might have a perf test or a stress test that you're running and you want to get a profile from that test. You can click that button and it'll start profiling now. Then there's triggers that you can set. If CPU goes above a certain threshold on the machines that are running your service, it'll trigger the Profiler to start. We have that by default set at 80 percent, and it'll run for 120 seconds. >> That's really cool. You don't even have to play the trial-and-error game or trying to figure out where those specs are coming from. >> Yeah, it'll start for you when CPU gets to a certain point. We also have a similar thing with memory. If your memory threshold gets above a certain point, we'll start the Profiler. Again, that's set at 80 percent as the default. Then there's this setting here. This isn't released yet. I'm showing you testing bits here. Like I said, the Profiler runs by default a couple of minutes an hour. Up until now, we haven't had a way to change that setting. It's just that's what it is and that's what you get. We've had a lot of people ask us, "Can I turn that off? I only want to have the other triggers or I only want to have "Profile Now"." We've given you ability to turn default profiling on and off, and then you can also set it normal, high, or max. Instead of running two minutes an hour, you might want to run it more than that. That's high or max is like run it as much as you can possibly run it. I wouldn't recommend doing that in a production service for very long because you could start affecting the performance of your app because we're collecting some very low-level data and then uploading that data, it could take up resources that your app would need to run. >> Sure. >> Yeah. I recommend keeping it on normal, but there are cases where you might want to increase it. Then this shows you recent profiling sessions that we've done. On the left here you can see, it tells you how those sessions were triggered. Most of these are default sampling, which is that random we're just going to profile and hope we catch something cool. Then we have a few here that are triggered by the CPU trigger. >> That's so helpful. >> Yeah. >> Just filtering out my problem. >> Yeah, and it's nice too because the date's here. If you knew you had a problem at a certain point in time, you can come in here and look, "Okay. On Tuesday at nine o'clock in the morning we had a high CPU, let me click on that and see." I don't want to click on this right now because it takes a bit of time to load, but if you do click on that, it loads all the events that happened during that profiling session and lets you look at traces for that session, which I'll show you that in a minute in a slightly different way. >> Cool. >> That's the Profiler homepage. Now let's go back to the Performance blade. This is the page that people are going to use to investigate performance problems. By default on this page, it shows you the average length of time for a request, but I would recommend if you're looking into a problem, you want to switch this to the 99th percentile. This is showing you the longest requests. In this chart down here, so you see all the requests that your application server serves and how long those requests took for the 99th percentile. You can see, we have some requests here. Now, this is a contrived example. We've done this on purpose to make it have long-running requests. But you can see this one here takes 23 seconds. >> That's a long time. >> That's quite a long time for requests. You want to look into that, why is that taking so long? This chart over here is now, not very interesting for this service because all of my requests, because it's an example, take the same amount of time. But this is a histogram that'll show you, for each time slot, how many requests you had in that time slot. Then the little triangles at the top indicate for that time slice or that time slot, you have a profile. I can drill into that if I went and see, I have request that take 20 seconds, I have request that take 22 seconds. On a production service, hopefully, you have a broader range of times and it looks cool to see all the different time slots that your requests are taking. But once you drill into this, you can click down here to this Profiler traces button. You can see it says 41. It means that for the filters that I have on this page, we have 41 examples of a request that took that amount of time that we can show you detailed data about. I'll click that, and this will load the list of requests on the left, and you could probably count them. This should be close to 41 or if not exactly on 41. This is the detailed data that we have about that request. You should be able to see your code in here. This is a call stack of what happened during that request and what took the most time. We try to highlight the hot path for you, which is the pieces of that request that took the most CPU time. For this one, you can see we're doing an array sort and that sort is taking a long time. There's CPU time scattered throughout here, and there's waiting time scattered. The waiting time is because this is taking so long for the sort, that this thread is getting swapped off to CPU and back on because the CPU can't allow one thread to just take over, so it keeps sending it off to the CPU, then go, "I'll get back to you in a minute, call me back on," that's what the waiting is. You probably want to look into why is my sort taking so long. Am I doing it some weird way? Am I sorting too much data? There might be something you could do to speed that up. >> For instance, I noticed the Download Trace button and Visual Studio, that got 10 profiler, so could you theoretically download this trace, upload into VS and then track down on what line of code is causing that giant performance spike? >> Yes, you can. Very good question. That's exactly what you can do. The really cool thing about the Download Trace button is it gives you that whole two-minute trace. The view we have here is only what happened during your specific request that you are looking at. But this Download Trace button downloads the whole two-minute ETW file, which you can open in many different tools like Purview, Windows Performance Analyzer, or Visual Studio. I can show what that looks like in Visual Studio. This is one I've opened in Visual Studio. One thing to note about when you download that file, it downloads it as a Zip file. Visual Studio doesn't recognize a Zip file. You have to rename the file to end in .diagsession, D-I-A-G-S-E-S-S-I-O-N. If that's the file extension, Visual Studio can open it. >> Got you. >> But Purview and Windows Performance Analyzer can open the Zip files. >> Sweet. >> Yeah. Then you can use the Visual Studio DIAGSESSION tools to dig into this and see what's happening with your code at that point. >> That's awesome that you can work together harmoniously if you want to. >> Yeah. The really cool part about it is you're getting this from a production service. You didn't have to do anything to collect this data, we've collected it for you. Hopefully, it has interesting things in it and you can find something to fix in your app. >> Yeah, that's awesome. >> Let me just show you a view of Windows Performance Analyzer, because it has amazing analysis that you can do. This is from a DIAGSESSION session that I collected from one of our actual production services. You can see just the charts and graphs are just unbelievable data that you can get from this. >> Yeah. >> It takes a little bit of time to figure out what all it's telling you. >> I'm a little overwhelmed. >> Yeah. But it has really nice documentation, and I know users that have got some really valuable information from this tool, so it works very well. >> It's just nice that users have options either way. >> Yeah. This being a Visual Studio show, we hope you use Visual Studio, but there's other tools too. >> Sweet. If I wanted to go learn more, since I'm very much new to the profiling space especially with Application Insights, where can I go to learn more? >> You can go to our Help page, which is here. We have a pretty extensive documentation. We're always looking to improve it so leave us a comment if you have questions and we can edit this documentation anytime. But this tells you how to enable it for different types of services, and then some other options that you have, and then there's some troubleshooting at the bottom if you have problems. >> Great. Seems like that's a lot of good stuff to get started with. >> Yeah, we hope so. >> Sweet. What's next for the Profiler? >> Thanks for asking. We are looking at expanding what we show. In the browser, we have this view of just one request, but we'd like to be able to show, and then we've recently added this flame graph, I can't remember if I showed that earlier. But we want to be able to show you information from the whole Trace file. This is a very request-oriented view and we've gotten a lot of feedback from users that they'd like to see, without downloading the Trace, can I see information about the whole Trace? That's what we're looking at doing now, is it's allowing you to see maybe a flame graph for the entire ETW session. We want to give you some more insights too as to where things might be slowing down and why, and so we're working on some detection of patterns that we see in people's code and we could give you hints about what might be slowing your code down. >> Cool. Yeah, I can't wait to see that stuff. >> We'll have to come back and do another show when we have some of that ready. >> Yeah, definitely. Speaking of which, thanks for coming now. I think that's really cool info that I'm sure tons of people would find incredibly useful whenever they run into those performance issues. >> You're welcome. >> Great. >> At the top here, there's the help and send feedback. If you use these links, it will contact our team also so if you need help with things, we're there ready to help people. >> Awesome. We actually do pay attention to the feedback that people send. Don't hesitate to reach out. With that, once again, thank you so much and hope everyone goes and tries out the cool profiling tools that we just talked about. With that, happy coding. [MUSIC]