JetBrains Rider
 
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  1. Game development with JetBrains Rider
  2. Unreal Engine
  3. Debug Unreal Engine Project

Debug Unreal Engine Project

Last modified: 08 August 2022

With JetBrains Rider, you can set line breakpoints, watchpoints, conditional breakpoints, and others. You can also use evaluate expressions or set values during debugging sessions.

Natvis support

The LLDB-based debugger has support for Natvis files and automatically finds and loads the UE4.natvis, providing user-friendly views of Unreal Engine data types.

The following Visual Studio Natvis customization features are supported:

  • Inheritable attribute, which specifies whether a visualization applies only to a base type, or to a base type and all derived types.

  • Format specifiers, which control the format in which a value is displayed.

  • CustomListItems, which allows you to write custom logic for traversing a data structure. This is especially useful for the containers in Unreal 4.26 like TMap and TSet.

Natvis support

Built-in renderers:

  • JetBrains Rider automatically generates one-line summaries for all structures not covered by Natvis, and summaries are colored to increase readability.

  • JetBrains Rider shows the [Raw View] for Natvis-generated values.

  • Built-in formatters are enabled for wide/Unicode strings (wchar_t, char16_t, char32_t).

Symbol servers on Windows

When debugging, sometimes the library symbols are not available on your local machine. In this case, you can use symbol servers.

The symbol server is a file server that stores your debug symbols centrally, on a server, rather than on each developer’s machine. Then, you can point your debugger to the symbol server to resolve symbol names. Everyone can share the same server.

In JetBrains Rider on Windows, you can point the debugger to the symbol server of your choice in Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Debugger | Symbol Servers:

Symbol servers

JetBrains Rider lets you configure symbol servers (or indexed storages) and non-indexed shared folders separately. If you need to add a public Microsoft symbol server, click the corresponding link.

When configured for the first time, the download is triggered on the debugger session start. When the symbols are downloaded, library symbols will be correctly resolved. For example, frames from Windows system libraries will be shown.

Symbol server: OFF

Symbol server: ON

Symbol servers support disabled
Symbol servers support enabled

The Enable symbol servers support setting allows a debugger in JetBrains Rider to use any downloaded symbols cache locally. The directory of this cache is configurable in the settings.

note

This setting is only supported on Windows for Microsoft’s approach to symbol servers. Currently only .pdb files are supported, not .exe/.dll files (CPP-29389).