Polycode – Open Source, cross-platform framework for games and interactive apps
polycode.org
polycode.org
But damn, this is how you build a product website.
Very Unity like look and feel but with the added open source and deeper C++ access that is still required in games. In Unity you can build plugins for each platform like I am sure you would need for extra libs here.
And I don't trust Unity not to close up shop one day and leave me high and dry with closed-source, bit-rotting libraries. Or to not target a platform I care about in the future, again leaving me screwed. I need to control the stack, and Unity is antithetical to this. (This is also why I have moved away from Xamarin's stuff--while enough of their stuff is open that I could spend multiple man-years re-implementing it if it went away tomorrow, it's a much better investment of my time to use the platform APIs directly.)
That being said, I share many of your frustrations, but I think the root cause is that its closed source and not any particular design decision they made. At the end of the day the design is straight forward, but its hard to wrap your head around since you can't easily just look at the code and go "ah ok FixedUpdate gets called right after WhateverFunction, now this makes sense". This is severely exacerbated by bad documentation. Here is one of my favorite examples: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Time-s... "Time.smoothedTime - A smoothed out Time.deltaTime (Read Only)." Great, no idea why I'd ever want this or what it actually does. In OS land I'd just go to the function, but not such option here.
On the other hand, I have considerable more faith in Unity than some OS tool to be around in the future and to support new platforms. They have a really great track record of this (they've been around forever), and the fact that they make money is more comforting to me than some random group of developers doing it for the love of programming. However, more tools is better, I'm in no way suggesting Polycode isn't cool or shouldn't exist or anything.
For me, that tool based approach was a deal breaker, didn't care about it's closed source...
Either way, doesnt hurt to have competition :)
I did embed Ruby into C++ once, but it was rather clumsy and it would sometimes cause a segmentation fault (my C++ was beginner level at best then, so I just abandoned ship without trying to fix it, since I wouldn't know where to look). I wish someone smart does this successfully. Daydreams
Seriously, looks very interesting.
[EDIT] I will actually have a go with polycode to see if it solves the issues I have now with some other projects. Looks good.
They don't strike me as particularly obtuse. But I write a decent amount of C++ already, and I've come to terms with the reality that there is always some assembly required.
Binaries don't strike me as particularly useful for C++ projects. C projects, moreso, but with C++ you've got to support a number of different C++ runtimes per platform (the various MSVCRTs on Windows, libstdc++ and libc++ on OS X) and it's probably just better to have the user--who is going to be the one stuck with it--build it themselves.
The build steps seem to miss the IDE though. The part I was most interested in. I have postponed playing with Polycode until I get that to work on OS X.