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Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

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Re: Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

#21

Post by reitzensteinm »

ramseynasser wrote: post #20
reitzensteinm wrote: post #19

This looks fantastic. I'm a full time Unity developer that uses Clojure for all non gaming tasks, so I'm pretty much the perfect target market. My only concern is - do you have any way to have compatibility with IL2CPP[1]? As I understand it, there's a preview of the exporter already in Unity 5. Without it, WebGL will not work, and it would not be a surprise to see similar technology used for iPhone deployments in th…

IL2CPP has been on our radar for a while. We haven't gotten any real access to Unity 5 yet, so we can't say what the compatibility will be like for sure. But since IL2CPP acts on the CLR bytecode, and Arcadia emits valid CLR bytecode, in theory there shouldn't be a problem. Time will tell!

That would be fantastic!

There would need to be ClojureScript style restrictions on the code though, right? IL2CPP wouldn't allow (eval) at runtime by its nature.

Re: Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

#22

Post by sbochins »

Wow, this is like a magical christmas present from above. I've never toyed around with Unity but have done some android 3d game development using java in the past. But, this will really get me motivated to start working on something. I'm not sure I'll make anything useful or very playable, but this should make for some great weekend hack projects.

Re: Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

#23

Post by timsgardner »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #21
ramseynasser wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IL2CPP has been on our radar for a while. We haven't gotten any real access to Unity 5 yet, so we can't say what the compatibility will be like for sure. But since IL2CPP acts on the CLR bytecode, and Arcadia emits valid CLR bytecode, in theory there shouldn't be a problem. Time will tell!

That would be fantastic! There would need to be ClojureScript style restrictions on the code though, right? IL2CPP wouldn't allow (eval) at runtime by its nature.

Good question, reflective code emission won't work on some platforms. We think this will only be an issue for eval. In the future we'll probably have options for disabling eval while retaining macros for AOT.

Re: Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

#25

Post by Rapzid »

timsgardner wrote: post #9
ramseynasser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally! Arcadia is based on the Clojure-CLR port (an official project) maintained by David Miller for five years or so. It supports Mono. We had to fork the compiler to introduce a small number of changes to make Arcadia work in Unity, though. Unity ships a very old version of Mono with their own changes, so stock Clojure-CLR would not work. https://github.com/clojure/clojure-clr https://github.com/arcadia-unity/clo…

Clojure-CLR is the real deal, too - 1.7, transducers, etc. nREPL support's probably coming soon.

That would be fantastic. If it could hook up to LighTable OOTB that would be a fantastic way to introduce people to it.

Re: Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

#26

Post by TillE »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #16
CmonDev wrote: post #4

"Unity brings the cutting edge graphics" - huh? Great initiative though.

Unity's actual power is belied by the poor quality of the default shaders (especially shadows) and weak assets commonly used in amateur games. A dedicated graphics programmer, backed up by professional-quality assets, can get a lot of mileage out of it.

It's fine. Good, even. But really not "cutting edge". There's a huge gap between Unity and Unreal Engine 4.

Re: Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

#28

Post by ntSean »

TillE wrote: post #26
Hemospectrum wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity's actual power is belied by the poor quality of the default shaders (especially shadows) and weak assets commonly used in amateur games. A dedicated graphics programmer, backed up by professional-quality assets, can get a lot of mileage out of it.

It's fine. Good, even. But really not "cutting edge". There's a huge gap between Unity and Unreal Engine 4.

Curious myself, in what way do you find the 'huge gap' especially noticeable?

Re: Arcadia: Unity 3D Development in Clojure

#30

Post by fsloth »

Hemospectrum wrote: post #16
CmonDev wrote: post #4

"Unity brings the cutting edge graphics" - huh? Great initiative though.

Unity's actual power is belied by the poor quality of the default shaders (especially shadows) and weak assets commonly used in amateur games. A dedicated graphics programmer, backed up by professional-quality assets, can get a lot of mileage out of it.

This, this and this. For top notch presentation, you need good art, first and foremost. Then the graphics substrate needs to pack enough punch. The engine is the canvas and the brush and the paints - but not the painter. Art is not a random linear combination of default assets no matter how many cycles you use for your rendering equation. You need a coherent grammar of visual presentation that is pleasing to the eye. The engine can facilitate this if you know what you want but it cannot make anything awesome by itself.
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