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0 pointspjmlp2mo ago0 comments

The biggest issue is that Unity is at the same time, the farol beacon for doing game develpment in C#, that Microsoft refuses to support, see how much effort Apple puts on game kits for Swift, versus DirectX team.

Efforts like Managed DirectX and XNA were driven by highly motivated individuals, and were quickly killed as soon as those individuals changed role.

One could blame them for leaving the project, or see that without them managemenent did not care enough to keep them going.

While at the same time, since Unity relies on such alternative approaches, it also creates a false perception on how good .NET and C# are in reality, for those devs that never learned C# outside Unity.

In a similar way it is like those devs that have learnt Java in Android, and get sold on the Kotlin vs Java marketing from Google, by taking Android Java as their perception of what it is all about.

Going back to game development and .NET, at least Capcom has the resources to have their own fork of modern .NET, e.g. Devil May Cry for the Playstation was done with it.

"RE:2023 C# 8.0 / .NET Support for Game Code, and the Future"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDUY90yIC7U

0 comments

torginus2mo ago

Very interesting talk, will definitely watch when I have the time!

XNA was very influential for me as well - when I was in high school, I tried to get into 3D game dev, and I started with Frank. D Luna's otherwise excellent book on DirectX gamedev - man that thing was a tome. However, having to learn DirectX, C++, linear algebra, shaders, WIN32 API, COM etc. at the same time (which to be fair were explained very thoroughly by the book), was just too much for me back then, not to mention the absolute pain of trying to get models and assets in the game.

Later on I discovered XNA, and it was a breath of fresh air for me - a much easier language, good IDE support and a decent way of importing assets, and an much nicer API made it so much easier to get started.

And the truly great thing about it was that it didn't dumb things down or hide stuff from the developer - it merely provided sane defaults, and utility functions so that you didn't have to engage with all that complexity at once.

I think Unity was also great as well, at least in the beginning (the first decade of existence), but it's chief issue is that Unity's 'dialect' of C# was very different from how you programmed in regular C# (or mostly any other engine) - my feeling is that Unity should've spun their own language/runtime rather than trying to make C# into what it wasn't designed to be.

debugnik2mo ago

> Unity should've spun their own language/runtime

They did, and that's why their C# API is such an oddball. Unity used to support 3 .NET languages: UnityScript, Boo, and C#. UnityScript started as the recommended one, but I believe it was just a JS-like syntax for Boo's semantics. Eventually C# users dominated, and UnityScript and Boo got deprecated and removed, but Unity's .NET API was left with all the quirks from their UnityScript era.

pjmlpOP2mo ago

They did, hence Boo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo_(programming_language)

I would argue that C# has always been a good alternative for games, starting with Arena Wars, the problem was Microsoft not being serious about AOT or low level programming, because that was left for C++/CLI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_Wars

Here is the person responsible for pushing XNA, even though management wasn't into it.

"The billion dollar decision that launched XNA"

https://youtu.be/wJY8RhPHmUQ?si=_3pic4pEiOlqQzvm

When she left Microsoft, XNA was promptly replaced by DirectXTK, because C++ is the only true way for DirectX team,

https://walbourn.github.io/directxtk/

to11mtm2mo ago

Capcom doing their own env is still a bit extreme sounding to me in it's own right (with the shitpost comment of, I bet they have a slick dispatcher involved somewhere vs 'trust the threadpool')

But then I remember they have to deal with IL2CPP, because lots of mobile/console platforms do not allow JIT as policy.

.NET does now have 'full AOT' as a thing at least, and Streets of Rage 4 I believe used CoreRT for at least a one of the platforms it was released for.

What's more hopeful about that, is that you can see backers of many different architectures contributing towards the ecosystem.

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