[sambeau]

  >in the gamedev domain, control over memory is fairly vital.

C# is taking over the game world. Most iOS games are, for instance, written in C# these days.

I have worked for a company who wrote a state-of-the-art 3D PC gaming engine in C#.

Being garbage collected doesn't remove the ability to manage memory. It just removes the need to call Malloc directly.

[Mikeb85]

The fact that Unity uses C# as one of it's scripting engines doesn't mean that C# is taking over the game world (I'll assume that's where the C# reference is from - since Unity is incredibly popular for iOS devs). The vast majority of games are still C++, often scripted in Lua, Python, Javascript and C#.

[sambeau]

I wouldn't describe Unity's relationship with C# as 'scripting'.

I realise that there are no doubt a number of custom C++ engines out there with embedded scripting languages but push for multi-platform mobile games has caused an huge shift towards Unity.

Maybe I'm moving in the wrong circled here — but anecdotally all the people I know making iOS & Android games are developing in Unity.

[Mikeb85]

From the horse's mouth: http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/9675/is-unity-engine-wr...

And I don't doubt that alot of devs use Unity, it's most likely the most popular game engine. But it's still a C++ project, despite the languages used to script game events...

[CmonDev]

Xamarin

[pmelendez]

> "C# is taking over the game world. Most iOS games are, for instance, written in C# these days."

When the engine underneath is done in C# as well I will take that argument. So far, it would be the same that saying that most console games are done in UnrealScript.

[jaegerpicker]

Most iOS games aren't C# now a days. Unity likes to trot out the 70% number for mobile games but it's mostly bs. That isn't counting games that are actually published that based on there registered numbers, a lot of of never actually make it into the store. I'm willing to bet the most of iOS games are still Obj-C

[sambeau]

I'd take that bet.

I know many iOS game developers and none of them use Objective-C any more.

(in fact I only ever knew one)

[epsylon]

> state-of-the-art 3D PC gaming engine in C#.

How does it compare to Cry Engine, Unreal Engine, Frostbite, ...?

Because these are the state of the art gaming engines these days.

[sambeau]

It compared surprisingly favourably. The C# engine was comparable (and regularly compared) to the Unreal Engine being used elsewhere in the company.

It was C# from the ground up. Scripting was provided via other .Net languages (Python in the case of the UI team).

[CmonDev]

Those are state of the art graphics gaming engines. It's quite hard to make e.g. an RTS using any of those. They are too FPS specific.

[Strom]

Command & Conquer is being built on Frostbite. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer_(2013_video...

[noct]

Are you referring to Unity? If so, while the game code is run via Mono, it is C++ internally.

[CmonDev]

Which is just some machine code eventually. It's just electric signals people!

[speeder]

Are you SURE about that?

Well, for shitty games maybe it is true, shovelware aplenty on iOS anyway.

But for the part of the market that actually has a profit (not just revenue) C# is not that dominant.

In terms of profit, the most profitable games probably still rely on C++.

Also most engines (including Unity) are made in C or C++, they sorta abstract the memory management for the game author, but they still do a lot of manual fiddling themselves, XNA for example (that allow you to write C# games directly to the hardware without a C++ engine) is notorious for bigger games having memory issues.

Also 2D "retina" games use so much absurd amounts of memory, that they are almost impossible to do purely in high-level languages, you need some C or C++ somewhere to handle them, at least texture loading, otherwise you end with loading times so big that people want to suicide.

[pjmlp]

Loading times don't have anything to do with the language.

Loading times have been an issue since game consoles moved away from cartridges.

[RobotCaleb]

I'm interested in knowing more about that engine. Can you say who/what it is?

[sambeau]

Realtime Worlds

[RobotCaleb]

Ah, yes. Out of Boulder?

Which game's engine was in C#? Project MyWorld?

[sambeau]

Yes. But out of Dundee, Scotland.