Rider is a powerful IDE by JetBrains that allows you to quickly develop games. I have been using this fantastic editor to code for the past year and its amazing. I have been using it for development at Plutoverse as well as for VR Engine.
Lets start from the appearance side, Rider for Unreal looks much better than visual studio’s design and has a huge focus on the integration between C++ and Blueprints. It has great auto completion and syntax checking.
The Interface is customisable (I currently use The Doki Theme) and you’re able to drag windows around to your liking.
The integration Rider has between C++ and blueprints is great. It allows me to easily see if a C++ function is used anywhere in blueprints.
One of the downsides of using Rider as an IDE for game development is that it’s RAM hungry. With a normal unreal template I see Rider use around 5GB of RAM and with a project with lots of code and using the source version of unreal I’ve seen it peak to 10GB. This takes out a huge chunk of my RAM and having multiple programs open with development I usually see my self hovering around 20GB.
Another downside is that in Visual Studio you can place 2 breakpoints and use them to see how fast and efficient the code your writing is but in Rider it’s not a thing.
In conclusion I think that Rider is great for game and software development but lacks behind on some essential features, Although the indexing of files and high memory usage could make it a pain to use on some larger projects, I still think it’s a fantastic tool to have available.