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Comment by Auracle | Hacker News Reader

If Unreal (natively) adopted C# that would absolutely be a killing blow to Unity, to the point where I'm amazed they haven't done it.

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I don't think that's true, and I don't think the juice would be worth the squeeze. Unreal's flavour of C++ is heavily managed, relying on preprocessing of header files to create garbage collecting pointers and a whole heap of other things you don't think you're signing up for when you think about a C++ codebase. There is no simple place to begin if you're trying to make it C# friendly.

But most of my issues have been with engine philosophy, where Unreal has bent over backwards to expose things to their visual scripting language. It feels like every single feature has a mandate to work in a blueprint tech demo, and as a result few of them are pleasant to code against and almost none of them work together coherently. These are not issues that depend on the language used.

C# being the deciding factor an incredibly common refrain in game development "what engine do you/should I use?"

Whether or not it's justified is another manner. I haven't personally dealt with the modern Unreal Engine but natively supporting C# would, at the very least, make people a lot more likely to switch over.

I think if you used the modern Unreal Engine you would change your tune.

I was surprised that Unreal Engine didn't just translate Blueprint directly into C++ code. They already have a text-based version of Blueprint. You can see it when you copy a blueprint graph and paste it into a text file (or at least you could when UE4 launched).

Honestly, Unreal C++ isn’t that bad or hardcore. It’s fairly high level, and Unreal APIs are pretty well designed. You spend way more time dealing with Unreal specific stuff and your game objects than dealing with C++ issues.

Disagree. Unity is pretty strong on mobile and multi-plattform. Enough to survive on this alone (imo). I also think Blueprints is already a strong competitor for the share of users who find C++ too complicated (non-programers and people who have only dabbled in scripting). I think for "traditional programers" the difference between C++ and C# isn't big enough to make a difference and frankly people with a gamedev background probably prefer C++.

That being said as a non mobile guy who occasionally dabbles in engine stuff I'll be migrating to Unreal for good now. I haven't been a paying customer for a while now but I used to pay for Unity back in the super early days of AR.

Or I guess take another serious look at Godot :D

Mobile is the kind of use case where the pricing changes will be massively impactful though. If you're selling a non-mobile game for $10+ then you can just eat the per-install fee, but if you're shipping a free to play app or a $1 app? The per install fee could make your business model nonviable.

I mean, knowing c++ and c#, I am always terrified about the former. There is an enormous set of things that shouldn't be touched and a whole set of gotchas in managing headers, writing macros, templates. Granted none of the two are used at my day to day job.

>> [...] I'm amazed they haven't done it.

Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.

I've been tracking this (Epic Megagrant awarded!) project for a while that attempts to do very much that: https://github.com/nxrighthere/UnrealCLR

I'm also surprised though they haven't just gone and added C# support as a first class option, it seems like such an obvious win.

I don't mind C++, but can you delete the script file without closing the editor yet? It was such a turn off for me at the time that I abandoned all intentions of ever learning to use Unreal Engine.

There was C# support for Unreal (contributed by the Mono maintainers) at one point but Epic actively blocked it. They want everyone on C++ and nothing else

They gave UnrealCLR an epic megagrant. How can you say they "actively blocked it" ?

the megagrant appears to have happened in 2020, the blocking of unreal C# happened years and years prior and put an end to development (community and otherwise) at the time (pre-2017, I don't know the exact date)

I was super excited for Garry Newman's project to bring C# to UE but never transpired: https://sbox.facepunch.com/news/dev-blog-2

Maybe ChatGPT6 can port the UE C++ codebase to C# and we can call it UE6

There was also Mono UE [0] - which was being developed by some of the Xamarin folks.

I’ve not played around with any game development for a long while - does C# end up popular here just because people are familiar with Unity? I definitely get that C++ is not the most productive language - though improving perhaps.

Simply loading the .NET Core CLR is not difficult [1] - but unless things have changed since I last tried binding C++ interfaces to C# is time consuming, especially if you want to be able to implement an interface in managed code.

[0] - https://mono-ue.github.io/

[1] - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/netc...

Part of C#'s popularity with indies is due to the legacy of XNA. Thousands, probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of indies got started with XNA and released games using it, so it's natural to stay on C# whether you move to FNA, MonoGame, Unity or Godot

To add: C# is a language that is easy to pick up. If you've written Java then you could basically just start writing C#.

Probably even a C or C++ background would allow you to do that. Maybe even knowing js is enough.

S&box is still in progress and using C# but it is now using the Source 2 engine instead. You can actually get invoted to it on Steam and play/build games for it now too.

It previously used UE4 and C# integration was all working with that but, as soon as they found out that they could get access to Source 2, they took the opportunity. Makes sense because the team is significantly more experienced with the Source engine since most of them have previously worked on or with Garry's Mod.

JBMod 2 might be better, I hope fans of gmod unite and make Godot's Mod.

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