Hi, so I decided to use Unreal Engine 4, I'm using Fedora 25, My question: What are the pros and con of using a game engine and doing game dev inside a virtual machine? or should I even consider using a VM for game development? Generally I work with scripting but still, I need advice for these things.

Thank you very much for your time.

Don't think it'll work. Does your VM support DirectX 11?

The UE4 Editor is not intended to be run in a VM and I personally ran into a few technical issues when I tried on our build machine which is a pain. Some things you might like to consider:

- UE4 engine doesn't require the editor for the code side of things, you can build the output binaries which do run fairly well in VMs if you avoid many of the newer features DX10+, GL4+.

- Look at things like SwiftShader (now open-source and maintained by Google). This provides you with a drop in software rasterizer replacement of d3d9. It works with Unity quite well in a VM in DX9 compat mode. It is much slower (still quite usable on a modern machine) and along with exporting to Emscripten to test your game quickly through the VM boundary, is actually the best solution I can think of (or at least the best of a bad bunch).

- Run UE4 natively on Linux or perhaps make a chroot if you do not want to spam the OS with cruft.

- Developing in a VM have many benefits, unfortunately "game making kits" such as engine editors are currently a little too far in the wrong direction from professional coding practices. Perhaps look into "code only" engines that do not need tools instead. Such as Irrlicht, Ogre3D etc... Or automate the editor via scripts without needing to create a GPU context. Something like:

http://www.slashgames.org/unity3dwithoutgraphics/

You may think this feels a little bit "indie" but lets face it, that is exactly what Unity is. For UE4, once the project files have been generated, they should build fine on a headless machine or a VM so the situation is a little bit better.

Personally I hate the current trend of "editors" mostly for the same reason you will likely encounter, perhaps things will change in the future once Unity 5 or UE4 become obsolete in a few years and people realize the only way they can run these tools to actually compile their hard work is from within a VM.

I understand now thanks to you. Great help I'll keep this in mind and follow your guidelines.

The UE4 Editor is not intended to be run in a VM and I personally ran into a few technical issues when I tried on our build machine which is a pain. Some things you might like to consider:

- UE4 engine doesn't require the editor for the code side of things, you can build the output binaries which do run fairly well in VMs if you avoid many of the newer features DX10+, GL4+.

- Look at things like SwiftShader (now open-source and maintained by Google). This provides you with a drop in software rasterizer replacement of d3d9. It works with Unity quite well in a VM in DX9 compat mode. It is much slower (still quite usable on a modern machine) and along with exporting to Emscripten to test your game quickly through the VM boundary, is actually the best solution I can think of (or at least the best of a bad bunch).

- Run UE4 natively on Linux or perhaps make a chroot if you do not want to spam the OS with cruft.

- Developing in a VM have many benefits, unfortunately "game making kits" such as engine editors are currently a little too far in the wrong direction from professional coding practices. Perhaps look into "code only" engines that do not need tools instead. Such as Irrlicht, Ogre3D etc... Or automate the editor via scripts without needing to create a GPU context. Something like:

http://www.slashgames.org/unity3dwithoutgraphics/

You may think this feels a little bit "indie" but lets face it, that is exactly what Unity is. For UE4, once the project files have been generated, they should build fine on a headless machine or a VM so the situation is a little bit better.

Personally I hate the current trend of "editors" mostly for the same reason you will likely encounter, perhaps things will change in the future once Unity 5 or UE4 become obsolete in a few years and people realize the only way they can run these tools to actually compile their hard work is from within a VM.

You can also run with -nullrhi for no graphics on a build machine.

You can also run with -nullrhi for no graphics on a build machine.

Thanks, that helps.