Infrequently Asked Question: What software and hardware do I use?
Software
- Sketch still can’t be beaten for designing, managing and outputting the huge batches of assets needed for buttons and all their states, text boxes, and everything else.
- Photoshop, unfortunately.
- Visual Studio 2019, with a few plugins:
- VsVim lets you type using Vim shortcuts inside Visual Studio
- Visual Assist X is well worth the $130USD.
- Perforce for version control. Perforce is slow and clunky, but Unreal has so many binary files that you really need file locking and Git still doens’t really support that.
- Python for workflow tools and scripts. Did you know that Unreal has support for Python scripts in the editor?
- Vim for Python, text files, markdown.
Hardware
- Ergonomic keyboards saved my hands. I was using an Apple keyboard at work and got terrible RSI, that went away after I swapped to an ergonomic keyborad. I’ve tried a few over the years and the Microsoft ones are usually pretty good.
- An ergonomic mouse is also vital. I use a cheap vertical mouse that you can get anywhere online. Takes a week to get used to but totally worth it.
- A computer with an SSD and the fastest CPU that you can afford. Graphics card is secondary, get a good CPU for shorter compile times.
