Mono for Unreal Engine

Post by azakai » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 9:29 PM UTC

TillE wrote: post #17

j_s wrote: post #2

Maybe this will light a fire under Unity to get a recent version of a C# compiler. No one has ever been able to point me to an official explanation for why theirs is so far behind.

That was my number one reason for moving to UE4; announcing Unity 5 with no Mono runtime update was the last straw. Current versions of Mono could probably do a serviceable job with simulation-heavy games, but not Unity's ancient one. Bizarrely, they don't even have a C or C++ API. You can add native code libraries to your project in Unity Pro, but you always have to go through Mono to interact with the engine.

Post by Sir_Cmpwn » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 9:44 PM UTC

azakai wrote: post #30

One concern here is portability: If you write your game logic in C# on Mono, it won't run on all platforms (possibly for either technical or licensing reasons - you're limited to where Mono runs). For example it won't run on the HTML5 target. For comparison, Unity has written il2cpp to replace Mono to get around that, http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-... it basically compiles C# to C++, whi…

Post by migueldeicaza » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 9:49 PM UTC

azakai wrote: post #31

TillE wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was my number one reason for moving to UE4; announcing Unity 5 with no Mono runtime update was the last straw. Current versions of Mono could probably do a serviceable job with simulation-heavy games, but not Unity's ancient one. Bizarrely, they don't even have a C or C++ API. You can add native code libraries to your project in Unity Pro, but you always have to go through Mono to interact with the engine.

Unity is writing a C#-to-C++ compiler, il2cpp, see http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-... it's much faster that Mono on some things currently, http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/07/benchmarking-unity-perfo... but it is so far only used in the WebGL port. Long-term, il2cpp is meant to replace Mono in Unity, according to the first of those links.

Post by berdario » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 9:56 PM UTC

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #33

azakai wrote: post #30

One concern here is portability: If you write your game logic in C# on Mono, it won't run on all platforms (possibly for either technical or licensing reasons - you're limited to where Mono runs). For example it won't run on the HTML5 target. For comparison, Unity has written il2cpp to replace Mono to get around that, http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-... it basically compiles C# to C++, whi…

Mono is a well designed, very portable codebase. The only platform I can imagine having trouble _is_ the browser, but I would bet that you could compile mono with emscripten quite easily. Also, there's http://www.jsil.org/

Post by azakai » Thu, Oct 23, 2014, 9:59 PM UTC

migueldeicaza wrote: post #35

azakai wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unity is writing a C#-to-C++ compiler, il2cpp, see http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-... it's much faster that Mono on some things currently, http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/07/benchmarking-unity-perfo... but it is so far only used in the WebGL port. Long-term, il2cpp is meant to replace Mono in Unity, according to the first of those links.

Small clarification. It is faster than the old Mono they ship. Their Mono is at best Mono 2.10, about three years old, without any of our optimization work for three years, very notably, a lot of the LLVM support, or the new garbage collector. That said, the il2cpp looks like a very promising an interesting project, so kudos for that!