[PIGMI] Unity (and Xamarin) developer comments sought

[Doug]

> In my experience the UE4 blueprints have been quite good...

A lot of people like them. :)

I don't.

merging conflicts, dealing with broken links from renaming scripts, trying
to test your content, being unable to run the script files outside the
engine or create libraries of shared functionality... the performance hit
for every scene node that gets invoked via reflection. Trying to bind C++
classes to them and failing with the event hooks because of the dynamic
delegates.

Broadly they're fine 'as long as you don't do anything big or complicated'.

I'm sure you could make quite an acceptable cookie cutter 1st person
shooter with them.

...and to be fair, the material editor is pretty amazing.

Anyhow, that's ok, not everyone has to have the same opinion as me; it's
good to hear various voices on the topic. :)

~
Doug.

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 11:38 AM, Christopher Hayward <
chris.f.hayward at gmail.com> wrote:

> Huh. In my experience the UE4 blueprints have been quite good, but that's
> been from a hobbyist point of view.
>
> For reference, for sharing blueprints on the web, someone created this -
> http://blueprintue.com/
>
> - Chris
>
> On Fri, 17 Jul 2015 at 11:30 Doug <douglas.linder at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>
>>
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>
> --
> - Chris
>
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