[PIGMI] Unity (and Xamarin) developer comments sought

[Doug]

Fwiw; I've used Xamarin briefly, it was polished, but suffered from two
major draw backs:

1) No PCL. Basically a deal breaker, and why we didn't go any further.
However, this is mostly resolved now, see
http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/application_fundamentals/pcl/

2) The out of the box, xamarin mobile applications are pretty large. Maybe
10MB for a trivial app.

We never pursued it beyond the investigation phase, and this was 2 years
ago, so it's probably worth getting a more recent opinion too.

re: Unity

> what proportion of people are using just UnityScript without any C#?

I believe I saw some metrics saying about 20-25% of their script metrics
were unity script not C#?

That said, I wrote a few thousand lines of UnityScript before I completely
gave up on it. It's slower (although not significantly...) than C#, but the
array, refection and generic's support in it is just completely broken or
non-existent.

In some ways the syntax is pleasantly javascript / typescripy, but since
you have to invoke C# types all the time anyway, there's little benefit;
and without true javascript interop, you can't leverage any of the 3rd
party js ecosystem. /shrug

> Or any other non-C# environments such as Playmaker?

Never used it, but I can say hands down the UE4 blueprint system is so
completely broken and rubbish, I would never recommend it for anything. The
massive issues that constantly crop up for that visual scripting system are:

1) No way to merge without breaking everything.

2) No way to share snippets (eg. gist)

3) No way to run your scripts without the entire game engine runtime loading

4) No way to run or create tests for your scripts

I can't strongly enough recommend not using it.

Maybe the playmaker guys have solved some of these issues? ..but broadly
speaking, visual scripting systems have never been successful. Kismet is
the only 'big name' one that has major shipped products I'm aware of, and
there are plenty of people out there willing to tell you how that worked
out (ie. badly) with UDK3.

~
Doug.



On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 2:50 PM, Andy Dent <dent at oofile.com.au> wrote:

> Hi folks
>
> For the 99.99%  of you who don’t follow my tweets  keenly, I’m now working
> for realm.io on their C# API team.
>
> I’m very keen to talk to people using Unity or Xamarin about their
> expectations from an API, how they find and use 3rd party components and
> war stories especially around building.
>
> In particular, in the Unity space, what proportion of people are using
> just UnityScript without any C#? Or any other non-C# environments such as
> Playmaker?
>
> Whilst I possibly have your Xamarin-oriented attention, as a personal
> curiosity, is anyone using CocosSharp for 2D games? I’m using Cocos2D-X on
> some of my other projects.
>
> thanks
> Andy Dent
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