On 2/1/2014 3:20 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
Meanwhile Unity and similar engines are becoming widespread, with C++ being pushed all the way to the bottom on the stack. At least from what I hear in the gaming communities I hop around. What is your experience there?
It's not uncommon for Unity-engine games to drop down to C++ to optimize bottlenecks. Somewhat of a pain since you have to deal with the CLR <-> unmanaged marshalling mess. (I do really wish Unity would expose an optional C/C++ API so you wouldn't need a pointless CLR layer sandwiched between the C++-based engine and any non-CLR game code...)
Keep in mind too that while Unity is certainly powerful, the games written with it aren't usually the ultra-AAA titles (like Battlefield, Crysis or Last of Us, for example) where a major part of the business is "wow everyone with never-before-seen technical achievements or risk failing to recoup the gigantic development costs".
Come to think of it, I wonder what language Frostbite 3 uses for game-level "scripting" code. From what I've heard about them, Frostbite 3 and Unreal Engine 4 both sound like they have some notable similarities with Unity3D (from the standpoint of the user-experience for game developers), although AIUI Unreal Engine 4 still uses C++ for game code (unless the engine user wants to to do lua or something on their own). I imagine Frostbite's probably the same, C++, but I haven't actually heard anything.
