scott.richmond Posted December 17, 2013 Posted December 17, 2013 Hi, Wondering if anyone would be interested in a C# wrapper for the Unigine C API? A modern language like C# would be a much better development environment than pure C++ or Unigine's own UnigineScript for many developers. I've only done basic C# p/invoke before for a couple of unmanaged libraries, and so I'm doing some research now on just how hard it'd be to maintain given that we have access to the c headers. If its too hard to maintain I might not bother, but if it turns out to be not so difficult then I think I'll do it. Would anyone be interested in collaborating? I'd love to get some input from the Unigine developers as well.
Ugly1-1 Posted December 17, 2013 Posted December 17, 2013 It would be nice to have. Not sure how practical it is, it is. But I'll stand-up and register interest. My only concern would be the maintenance and lag time for updates.
scott.richmond Posted December 18, 2013 Author Posted December 18, 2013 It would be nice to have. Not sure how practical it is, it is. But I'll stand-up and register interest. My only concern would be the maintenance and lag time for updates. I would agree with you on all counts. The reason I bring it up is because I whilst I really love the technical ability of Unigine I find its development environment unintuitive, clunky, and just a bit old fashioned. To be clear I don't lay any blame on the Unigine devs there - Its just the nature of building your own interpreted language and missing out on the years of development of a modern language. It reminds me of the Unreal Engine with its UnrealScript, and the transition from that to Unity3D with its Java/C# development environment was a real eye opener. Not being able to easily utilize the power of those languages is a definite setback. Of course the C++ API is still there for use. And whilst my team are skilled with C++ we've all come to the conclusion that C# is a much faster language in terms of feature iteration speed. Its an extremely difficult pill to swallow to 'go back' to C++. I've spent some time looking into what it'd take to write a C# wrapper around the C++ API. It would not be a trivial amount of time. Given how small the Unigine community is I doubt I'd find many collaborators either, specially since I'm sure most of you have real products to deliver and cannot use such an incomplete wrapper for production code. I don't think this will get off the ground without the Unigine devs putting some effort in themselves. I was hoping they would see some business sense in it given that it would greatly ease the transition from the 3D Engine middleware almost all developers now grow up on - Unity3D.
binstream Posted December 18, 2013 Posted December 18, 2013 We are investigating introduction of C# API, but it is not the highest priority for now.
aargh Posted December 18, 2013 Posted December 18, 2013 Hi I recommend to see the project MOGRE, C# wrapper to opensource c++ 3D engine OGRE.
aargh Posted December 18, 2013 Posted December 18, 2013 The problem may be the unavailability of certain ung API features in cpp API.
scott.richmond Posted December 19, 2013 Author Posted December 19, 2013 We are investigating introduction of C# API, but it is not the highest priority for now. Thanks for replying. Its great to hear that this feature is being considered. I think it'd really help expose Unigine to the larger developer community. The problem may be the unavailability of certain ung API features in cpp API. Not all engine features are available in the C++ API? We are considering developing in the C++ API and I'd love to know what is missing?
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