Comment by bodge5000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bodge5000 | Hacker News Reader

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If Unreal got proper scripting language support, I'd seriously consider giving it another go. I'd rather they go the Unity approach than the Godot approach and use a real-world language (C# is used outside Unity of course, GDScript is only used in Godot, though it does have bindings), but I'll take what I can get, clearly as I use Godot rather than Unity.

As it stands, picking up blueprints feels like I have to learn a whole new system which will go to waste if I decide not to stick with Unreal, and C++ seems like it'd be a pain to work with.

Edit: Forgot Godot had C# support. It still doesn't feel as "first-class" as GDScript, but its certainly more closely integrated than bindings, so maybe something to consider. Also, whilst I generally prefer a single language being tied to a single tool (trying to learn Raylib taught me this, where every example you find is in a different language), its nice knowing I can use C# without being locked into Microsoft

I wonder if building a custom language is a simpler way to optimize stuff later on?

For example, Unity uses C# but then you need either all of Mono at runtime or something like IL2CPP to compile to C++. And then eventually that compiler is constantly needing to keep up with language releases and new features. Or in .Net’s case new languages like F#.

I'm sure it is, no doubt its easier to pick an existing language than build a whole new one.

For me however, the benefits of an existing language outweigh the costs. If Godot were to use Python for example, you'd gain the full benefit of pip alongside it. If you use C# with Godot, I know you can use Nuget. I'd also personally rather a more performant language than one thats easier to write, but thats personal preference.

There are scripting languages integrations for Unreal done in form of plugins. For example: https://angelscript.hazelight.se/

I guess the problem with plugins is that you can only ever get a small subset of the community. For example, if I wanted to figure out how to create a new object instance in Unreal, I'd have to look pretty hard for Angelscript specific examples. Whereas if its native, presumably it'd reach a lot more people and the community would be larger for it (not always the case, but a fairly safe assumption)

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