• "Joel Lamotte" <mjklaim gmail.com> Dec 19 2012
• "Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp progtools.org> Dec 19 2012
• Paulo Pinto <pjmlp progtools.org> Dec 19 2012
• "DypthroposTheImposter" <mcbracket gmail.com> Dec 19 2012
• "F i L" <witte2008 gmail.com> Dec 19 2012

"Joel Lamotte" <mjklaim gmail.com> writes:

So I was thinking vaguely about future of game programming in my 
own career, how I would have used D if there was more tool and 
library support for my domain and other similar things and it hit 
me that if D was a language available in some specific game dev 
tools, it's popularity and availability would jump to the roof.

I was wondering is either Andrei or Walter did try to contact 
Unity3D guys see if it would have been possible for them to have 
D as one of the possible scripting language?

I know D could be used from the paid version of Unity, like C++ 
can be called from Unity3D scripts. However D as a scripting 
language for it would be very interesting at least on the 
educational point.

What do you think?

Joel Lamotte

"Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp progtools.org> writes:

On Wednesday, 19 December 2012 at 14:21:43 UTC, Joel Lamotte 
wrote:
 So I was thinking vaguely about future of game programming in 
 my own career, how I would have used D if there was more tool 
 and library support for my domain and other similar things and 
 it hit me that if D was a language available in some specific 
 game dev tools, it's popularity and availability would jump to 
 the roof.

 I was wondering is either Andrei or Walter did try to contact 
 Unity3D guys see if it would have been possible for them to 
 have D as one of the possible scripting language?

 I know D could be used from the paid version of Unity, like C++ 
 can be called from Unity3D scripts. However D as a scripting 
 language for it would be very interesting at least on the 
 educational point.

 What do you think?

 Joel Lamotte


Although it would be nice, I think it would be an hard battle 
against C#, specially taking into consideration the amount of 
studios now making use of it.

--
Paulo

Paulo Pinto <pjmlp progtools.org> writes:

Am 19.12.2012 17:45, schrieb DypthroposTheImposter:
   Unity uses mono so any D compiler that could compile to pure CLI would
 be usable in Unity in theory


Yeah, but I was actually speaking about the language.

Since 2008, I have noticed here in Germany quite a few studios have 
migrated their tooling from MFC/C++ to either Qt/C++ or WindowsForms/WPF/C#.

Additionally most universities are now doing XNA and Unity based courses
in their game design courses.

And in the server side many are going C#, Java or even Erlang!

Sony is also using C# in their Playstation Mobile framework.

As a result, many are starting to feel comfortable to move from C++ to 
C#, if the type of game allows such decision.

So they would need to have a good reason to use D instead, even if it is 
available.

--
Paulo

"DypthroposTheImposter" <mcbracket gmail.com> writes:

  Unity uses mono so any D compiler that could compile to pure CLI 
would be usable in Unity in theory

"F i L" <witte2008 gmail.com> writes:

On Wednesday, 19 December 2012 at 14:21:43 UTC, Joel Lamotte 
wrote:
 So I was thinking vaguely about future of game programming in 
 my own career, how I would have used D if there was more tool 
 and library support for my domain and other similar things and 
 it hit me that if D was a language available in some specific 
 game dev tools, it's popularity and availability would jump to 
 the roof.

 I was wondering is either Andrei or Walter did try to contact 
 Unity3D guys see if it would have been possible for them to 
 have D as one of the possible scripting language?

 I know D could be used from the paid version of Unity, like C++ 
 can be called from Unity3D scripts. However D as a scripting 
 language for it would be very interesting at least on the 
 educational point.

 What do you think?

 Joel Lamotte


I doubt the Unity3D team will have much interest in adapting D to 
their engine, unfortunately. It just isn't cost effective, 
there's no real benefit over C# for what Unity makes use of 
(besides possibly getting rid of the Mono dependency). I'm pretty 
sure Unity also makes use of C#'s runtime reflection capabilities 
to dynamically bind to script events and properties. D is mostly 
just as capable as C# with runtime reflection (to my knowledge), 
but you have to build out structures manually, and it's much more 
difficult.

A better idea would be to make a new Game Engine completely 
written in D, which also uses D for "scripts". You'd still need 
to build runtime reflection structures for anything like Unity's 
editor, though. I was playing around with D the other day with a 
similar motive, but I never really came up with a solution on how 
to dynamically bind a delegate to a "unknown" type's function.