Mono for Unreal Engine • Hacker News Board

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#61

Post by Rapzid » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 5:05 AM UTC

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #8

j_s wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that they've added a profiler as another differentiator the chances of that happening may have improved slightly. They do have 'call us' deals for small/new businesses. I'm wondering if you would mind sharing what features you miss the most when you are away from Visual Studio? I've not tried it but I'd guess a lot of the editing is possible even if you do wind up stuck using Xamarin Studio for building and debug…

I've never played enough with Xamarin Studio and only tested Xamarin Business with Visual Studio (I've used a 30 days trial).

Its essentially branded monodevelop with bundled addins(or is mono develop now unbranded xamarin?). In any case, it has improved dramatically over the past couple years. I write services/daemons in it and find the C# functionality to be fantastic now. F# is coming along too.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#62

Post by kayoone » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 6:39 AM UTC

Awesome, the last thing that held me back jumping ship from Unity was that i love C# so much and have no prior C++ experience.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#63

Post by kayoone » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 6:43 AM UTC

socialist_coder wrote: post #54

drawkbox wrote: post #47

Definitely game changing. The barrier to move from Unity to Unreal is really low if this works out. Still best to do C++ where possible but this opens up Unreal drastically.

> The barrier to move from Unity to Unreal is really low if this works out. Not at all. You still have a huge chunk of your code written specifically for interfacing with UnityEngine. Also, coroutines instead of async. It still won't be easy to migrate.

Migrating an existing project won't be easy sure, but making the move to UE for a new project would be much easier for Unity devs now.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#64

Post by kayoone » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 6:44 AM UTC

_random_ wrote: post #22

Good! Unity is in a desperate need for competition. How old is their Mono version again?

I think they are still using 2.10 which is about 3 years old.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#65

Post by jbevain » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 7:38 AM UTC

_random_ wrote: post #22

Good! Unity is in a desperate need for competition. How old is their Mono version again?

Unity runs on a custom Mono 2.6.5 with some fixes cherry picked from Mono 2.10.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#66

Post by Skinney » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 8:59 AM UTC

azakai wrote: post #51

virtue3 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# has very defined behaviour that when "ported" to C++ is going to result in similar speed hits. Allocations are zero'd out. boxing/unboxing objects, array bounds checking. GC is going to be the big hit as you're still going to need to pay for that even in C++ land. I'm not really seeing what you'd get over just C# with a more modern JIT unless you start converting to non-safe C code and doing sneaky c stuff behind…

First and foremost, compiling to C++ means you then optimize it using a full C++ compiler like gcc or clang+LLVM. Not only are those compilers generally better than JITs, they can also do whole-program optimizations. JITs are getting that too (Dalvik=>ART, newer .NET runtimes), but the C and C++ compilers have a big head start. (In theory a JIT can do all the things C++ compilers do, of course.) Aside from performanc…

All true, but you're forgetting that Mono can AOT compile C# to native code using LLVM. That's how Xamarin.iOS works. So il2cpp doesn't really bring anything new to the table.

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#67

Post by ed_blackburn » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 9:52 AM UTC

I wonder if Xamarin are considering acquiring Untity 3D?

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#68

Post by keyle » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 9:56 AM UTC

kayoone wrote: post #62

Awesome, the last thing that held me back jumping ship from Unity was that i love C# so much and have no prior C++ experience.

The installation process (PC) kinda just threw me off :/

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#69

Post by shadowmint » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 10:44 AM UTC

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #28

mnglkhn2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the issue is related to the licensing fee which might be on a per dev seat and hence might not fit unity 3d's business model. Unless there is a hard stop issue, business wise, it won't happen.

When unity got their mono license xamarin wasn't yet a business, hence the license was most likely zero.

It would have been zero to Xamarin, but doubt it was free.

I imagine they bought a perpetual license to distribute sans-GPL the full code of a specific version of mono from Novell.

This thread has a bunch of speculation and a few comments from unity developers: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/new-version-of-mono-with-un...

Re: Mono for Unreal Engine

#70

Post by frik » Fri, Oct 24, 2014, 10:49 AM UTC

WallWextra wrote: post #3

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.

The unoffical reason is Xamarin wants too much money.

Mono is open source and free software. Because of the "single static binary" policy (no dynamic linking) of app stores you have to obtain a proprietary license from Xamarin.

• The C# compiler is dual-licensed under the MIT/X11 license and the GNU General Public License (GPL).

• The tools are released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

• The runtime libraries are under the GNU Library GPL 2.0 (LGPL 2.0).

• The class libraries are released under the terms of the MIT X11 license.

and:

When do I need to obtain a license from Xamarin to the Mono Runtime?

We only require licensing for uses of Mono and Moonlight on embedded systems, or systems where you are unable to fulfill the obligations of the GNU LGPL.

source: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/faq/licensing/