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Mono for Unreal Engine

mono-ue.github.io

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Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#41

Post by oblio »

thehardsphere wrote: post #21
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #12

C# is Unity's main programming language, now there's this for Unreal, and Godot 3.0 will also have C# support. Is C# becoming the lingua franca of modern game engines?

I would certainly hope not. C# implementations are terrible for lots of games on not-Windows. The version of Mono that has been included with Unity is particularly bad with respect to stop-the-world garbage collection pauses.

Shouldn't this stop being an issue under Microsoft's patronage? .NET definitely doesn't have a stop-the-world garbage collector and this should trickle to Mono, if it hasn't already.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#42

Post by oblio »

honestoHeminway wrote: post #37
dan00 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. If I remember it correctly, the Epic guys said something about switching back (for the Unreal Engine 4) from their own scripting language to C++, because multi language debugging was a nightmare, and working on a big Python/C++ project myself, I can comfirm this.

Arr, the inevitable defeat by the core languages performance boost- lets allow for pointers to arrays in the core language, to not loose speed. The locks and non-locks, the fun of value changes while some variable holds part of a array in local memory of the script languages maschine, the problem of external data corupption, without having everything under assert all the time aSSERT(Not NaN, Not Infinity). Plus, the…

> If it where not for the artists ease of use and fast iteration, nobody would use the script languages.

Aren't those core tenets of game production? :)

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#43

Post by SXX »

Arwill wrote: post #9
Blaaguuu wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Previously you could only write code for the Unreal Engine with C++ or the visual scripting system, Blueprints. This allows people to use C# for everything that they would normally need C++ to add to their games - which will particularly help with people who are trying to transition from Unity to Unreal.

UE3 had UnrealScript, a VM based scripting language, similar to Java or C#. It is odd, that Epic removed it in UE4, and now someone makes it as plugin.

There was one good podcast (that sadly not in English with) Nick Atamas (senior engine programmer in Epic).

They had serious reason to not provide any official scripting support in UE4. Basically there no single language and runtime that would work well across all platforms: between Python, Node.js, Mono none of them work on every platform Epic target. Some don't have good support for consoles and other for mobile platforms and maintaining fork is hard even for Epic. So instead they try to extend blueprints instead since for them there are no such problems with C++.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#44

Post by 0xFFC »

A little bit unrelated, but serious question. Mono and .net core are not going to converge? I mean that would be awesome. Since most of game developers nagging about Mono's bad performance

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#45

Post by thehardsphere »

oblio wrote: post #41
thehardsphere wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would certainly hope not. C# implementations are terrible for lots of games on not-Windows. The version of Mono that has been included with Unity is particularly bad with respect to stop-the-world garbage collection pauses.

Shouldn't this stop being an issue under Microsoft's patronage? .NET definitely doesn't have a stop-the-world garbage collector and this should trickle to Mono, if it hasn't already.

I believe it has stopped, or it had stopped a little bit before the acquisition. Other commentors indicated it has not trickled to Unity yet.

I am not up to date on the state of this in the latest Unity releases, I just know games I play on PS4 and OSX made with Unity stutter in places where they don't stutter on Windows.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#46

Post by Drakim »

org3432 wrote: post #34

Would be interesting if the author could comment on the memory footprint and performance of having an additional GC'ed language running alongside the engine. It seems like it could lead to complex hitching issues.

Wouldn't it be roughly like when games embed Lua?

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#47

Post by tezza »

carussell wrote: post #38
thehardsphere wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the licensing? Not disagreeing with you; this is just the first I've heard of it.

The popular telling of the story is that the team behind Mono asked for too much money to allow the Unity3D team to have a commercial license exception to newer versions of Mono. (This comes from the Unity team's explanation to the Unity community about why their runtime remains out of date. It's since become a meme to paint the Mono folks as a bunch of jerks over this. This endured for a few years. In the meantime,…

Unity v2017.1 released for general access a few days ago has the possibility of .Net 4.6.

it is marked as experimental for now, but their release notes say it will become the new default soon

I am evaluating 4.6 support now and it works okay so far for my VR Game

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#48

Post by littlehood »

nialo wrote: post #22
thehardsphere wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would certainly hope not. C# implementations are terrible for lots of games on not-Windows. The version of Mono that has been included with Unity is particularly bad with respect to stop-the-world garbage collection pauses.

Do you know if this is still true with the newer "concurrent" garbage collector in more recent Mono versions? I work on an audio player app rather than games, but also have problems with the GC in Mono on IOS. We're hopeful that eventually they'll go away, but haven't tried again recently.

It is an experimental option for Xamarin. Though haven't played with it.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#49

Post by xenadu02 »

thehardsphere wrote: post #21
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #12

C# is Unity's main programming language, now there's this for Unreal, and Godot 3.0 will also have C# support. Is C# becoming the lingua franca of modern game engines?

I would certainly hope not. C# implementations are terrible for lots of games on not-Windows. The version of Mono that has been included with Unity is particularly bad with respect to stop-the-world garbage collection pauses.

Like every other language used for game development: you don't allocate objects in the render loop. All objects are re-used and go into pools. Malloc isn't free (heh): maintaining the free lists can kill FPS just as quickly as anything else.

As others have pointed out: the CLR has had a concurrent low-latency GC for a long time now and now that it's all open-source there is nothing preventing Unity from adopting it.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#50

Post by carussell »

oblio wrote: post #41
thehardsphere wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would certainly hope not. C# implementations are terrible for lots of games on not-Windows. The version of Mono that has been included with Unity is particularly bad with respect to stop-the-world garbage collection pauses.

Shouldn't this stop being an issue under Microsoft's patronage? .NET definitely doesn't have a stop-the-world garbage collector and this should trickle to Mono, if it hasn't already.

Here's Miguel's blog post from a couple years ago (before the Microsoft acquisition) when their cooperative mode GC first landed:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2015/Dec-22.html

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