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Welcome to the Unreal Engine 5 Handbook, a collaborative effort dedicated to providing comprehensive and user-friendly documentation for Unreal Engine 5, in the hope of making Unreal more accessible to all developers.
The latest generation, Unreal Engine 5, was launched in April 2022. Its source code is available on GitHub, and commercial use is granted based on a royalty model, with Epic charging 5% of revenues over US $1 million, which is waived for games published exclusively on the Epic Games Store.
The offline Wiki allows you to conveniently browse the entire Unreal Wiki content from your local hard disk without requiring an Internet connection. All dynamic features (such as searching the Wiki, editing pages, and viewing older page revisions or version diffs) lead back to the live online Wiki.
- Overview
- Getting the source code
- Building the source code
- Using IDE
- Advanced debugging using Visual Studio
- C runtime library for MSVC
- Directory structure
- License
UE Viewer is a viewer for visual resources of games made with Unreal engine. Currently all engine versions (from 1 to 4) are supported.
The project was originally named the "Unreal model viewer", however the name was changed in 2011 to meet the request from Epic Games. Please note that "official" project's name is "UE Viewer", and a short unofficial name of the project is "umodel" (it was left from the older name "Unreal MODEL viewer").
The source code is available at GitHub. You may either checkout it with use of any Git client, or download it as a Zip file.
We are using own build system to compile UE Viewer. You may find a Perl script in Tools/genmake. This script generates makefiles from some human-friendly project format. After that you may build generated makefile using 'nmake' for Visual Studio or 'make' for gcc. Build process is controlled with build.sh script.
Visual Studio
As UE Viewer is using custom cross-platform build system, there's no MSBuild support. However we have a simple Visual Studio project which allows to use this IDE to edit, compile, run and debug the project. Project files are located in .vs directory. In order to open the project, you should start Visual Studio, use "Open a local folder" command, and then choose root project's directory. Please note: there's .sln file somewhere in Tools folder, don't use it - it is intended for UI framework testing. Please note that you should use Visual Studio 2019 or newer, otherwise some features will not work.
Visual Studio Code
UE Viewer contains project files needed for opening and running it from Visual Studio Code. Just open viewer's folder in VSCode, and you'll get everything. Project already has a build task and launch actions set up. Of course you'll need a C/C++ extension installed. You may build, launch and debug UE Viewer using this IDE. VSCode project comes with additional build command which could be bound to a key. Just use and then Ctrl+F7 key will compile a file currently opened in editor. Of course, it won't work for headers and other non-cpp files. By default, Visual Studio Code project performs Debug build. If you want something else, change .vscode/tasks.json file, and remove --debug option from build.sh command. There are 2 configurations For debugging: "No arguments" runs UE Viewer with default startup UI, and for use of command line you may launch 2nd "Volatile" configuration, which reads command line arguments from file docs/cmdline.cfg - please refer to Response files documentation for details on its format. You may also edit .vscode/tasks.json file to add your own debug configurations.
Initially UE Viewer was released without a Visual Studio solution. However it was possible to debug it within an IDE. The information below describes how to build and debug UE Viewer for debugging without use of VS project (e.g. when you're using older IDE version).
You can build a Debug version of viewer by uncommenting #define MAX_DEBUG 1 in UmodelTool/Build.h and rebuilding the project. After that you'll get executable with optimizations disabled, and with some extra features. For example, if umodel.exe crashes, and it is started with -debug option, standard Windows window appears with prompt to close program or debug it. You may choose "Debug with Visual Studio" there.
Also you may use --debug parameter for build.sh script. This will generate separate set of object files and link into debug version of the executable (with the same executable file's name). You may quickly switch between "debug" and "release" builds without having to fully recompile the program.
If you want to debug umodel.exe in Visual Studio without having a crash, you may load it either from IDE (File | Open | Project/Solution, then select umodel.exe), or you may type in console
UE Viewer is dynamically linked with CRT library, so it requires CRT DLL files to be installed onto your system. It is possible to statically link with you compiler's CRT by changing a line in common.project (with cost of growing executable file size):
to
UE Viewer uses custom CRT library for being able to link against MSVCRT.DLL. MSVCRT.DLL is chosen because it allows to reduce size of UE Viewer distribution without needs to install compiler runtime libraries onto a Windows system - MSVCRT.DLL present on any Windows installation. You may disable MSVCRT.DLL linking by commenting out the line
Previously there were some problems with using msvcrt.dll with Visual Studio compiler 2015 and newer. However all issues has been solved. For those who interested in details, I've prepared an article.
If you want to use MSVCRT.DLL, you should extract MSVCRT.zip archive available here to the directory LIBS one level above of UModel directory. So, the directory structure should look like this
Also you may change MSVCRT library path by changing WDKCRT variable in common.project.
Below is the list of major folders which exists in this repository or which are generated during build process.
UE Viewer is licensed under the MIT License, see LICENSE.txt for more information.
Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) is the latest version of Unreal Engine developed by Epic Games. It was revealed in May 2020 and officially released in April 2022.
This is really cool! Some limitations: That site needs some way to organize itself into categories. There's not many descriptions along with the code. I don't always know what to search for when I want a thing to do a thing.
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Aug 3, 2021 · In an ongoing partnership with Unreal Engine Marketplace creators, select content is available for free to the Unreal community each month, giving artists, designers, and programmers access to additional resources at no extra cost. Check out this month’s great selection below! August’s featured free content:
