Let's say I want to create a small 2D game. I'm no game dev so nothing fancy, just a PoC. I'm willing to take a code first approach and I love C#. What is my best best?
- Unity seems promising but they have a weird version of mono running things and not so recent C# features available. Might be a non issue.
- Godot seems more promising for my use case but I feel like they want you to use GDScript. I don't want to use GDScript while there is a perfectly capable C# engine there. Is .NET second class in Godot?
- MonoGame was basically abandoned for a long time. I wonder if it got any better. That might be a little too much "code first" though.
Stride.. I just heard it the first time ever. Its a shame. And apparently it is a proven engine especially in VR space. Jumped on it, unfortunately no macOS support available so can't dig in right now.
Recent versions of Unity are actually using Roslyn ¹) but they are admittedly running a bit behind on C# language version. The currently supported version is at 9 while 14 came out last month. It's not really a huge issue in practice, though.
With Godot 4, the big difference between Godot and Godot .NET is that the version with NET support does not build to web and mobile support is 'experimental' ²). Also, they are two completely separate downloads and editor binaries, which makes switching languages decidedly non-trivial.
For a 2D game, if you can live without building to web, I'd pick Godot. Otherwise, I'd pick Unity.
Godot has full C# support and it is a first class citizen. GDScript has a few advantages, the main being game package size, but they are extras from the fact it's a custom language. The C# development experience is smooth.
I have released commercially successful (for a single dev) games with Godot and C#. GDScript is just the default because most newer Godot users prefer the Python-like syntax, and being a custom language it has some extra features and integration in the editor.
I would strongly suggest that for quick code-first prototypes. The boiler-plate of "load a texture and render to screen" is quite minimal - you could perhaps make a small library for yourself?
It also has no opinions about how you structure your game data. This means you can represent things like a Flappy Bird clone as just a `Vector2`, rather than having to bash a graph of entities in the shape you want.
The thing with MonoGame is that it was designed to be an opensource version of XNA, thus it doesn't have an evolution path.
FNA has done some experiments going beyond XNA 4 API design, however for the type of 2D games XNA was designed for, there is little else to add anyway.
Unity is easily your best option if you've got any sensitivity to platform targeting issues. They are working on a CoreCLR conversion but no telling if it will actually see the light of day.
The lack of modern c# features and hijacking of things like null coalescing operators are annoying but it's not something that ruins the overall experience for me. The code is like 20% of the puzzle. How it all comes together in the scene is way more important.
As for advocacy, Microsoft's "Game development with .NET" page points first and foremost to Unity and their outdated, proprietary .NET toolchain; only by digging you get MonoGame/Godot/Stride listed. And if you dig for bindings, they'll first point you to a couple of open source DirectX bindings unmaintained for over 7 years.
I'd say they stopped caring about .NET specifically for game dev as soon as they abandoned XNA. Now they're doing the bare minimum that nets them Visual Studio licenses, which I'm not sure they care much about anymore after Copilot.
> During the past year (2020), Ignacio Etcheverry worked on significantly improving C# support and its integration in Godot, adding support for Android, HTML5 and iOS, as well as popular third party IDEs. This was financed thanks to a generous donation from Microsoft.
Nice find, thanks! Turns out Godot reached to Miguel de Icaza for a few grants from Microsoft for C# integration around 2017-2020. Coincidentally, I can't find any mention of Microsoft grants for Godot after de Icaza left MS. I guess we found who used to care for Godot at MS. Still, cool that they did it.
Raylib is a very good option for 2D games. For me it was the easiest way to translate my toy Doom renderer from javascript that used html canvas to C#.
Looks like it is already available on VSCode Copilot. Just tried a prompt that was not returning anything good on Sonnet 4.5. (Did not spend much time though, but the prompth was already there on the chat screen so I switched the model and sent it again)
Gemini 3 worked much better and I actually committed the changes that it created. I don't mean its revolutionary or anything but it provided a nice summary of my request and created a decent simple solution. Sonnet had created a bunch of overarching changes that I would not even bother reviewing. Seems nice. Will probably use it for 2 weeks until someone else releases a 1.0001x better model.
So I just took a look at DJ’s website and he has a college transcript there. Something looked interesting.
Apparently he passed a marksmanship PE course at the first year. Is that a thing in US? I don’t know, maybe its common and I have no idea. I’d love to have a marksmanship course while studying computer science though.
US colleges have a very open curriculum, where you have wide leeway in what classes you actually take, especially in the early years of study. If you're coming from more European-style universities, this is vastly different to the relatively rigid course set you'd take (with a few electives here and there).
Yeah, in Russia even thought everything is decided for you once you've selected your major, PE classes still for you to choose. Competition to get in was crazy too, none of that "first come, first served" - swimming only accepted top N students, table tennis held a tournament style competition (I went there with two friends and I had to play against both of them).
My college required its graduates to pass a minimal swimming test. Just enough swimming ability to give a potential rescuer some extra time to effect the rescue, rather than have us go straight to the bottom of the sea. We all took a test in the first week or so. Those who failed had to take a course and retake the test.
As a sibling poster mentions, US universities often have a very open curriculum. At my university, I got PE credit for classical fencing!
The marching band could also count for PE credit. I believe you could only get credit for one semester for it, and my university required two semesters of PE, so I gave fencing a try, having never fenced before.
I needed one PE credit to get a degree from my community college. My school didn't offer marksmanship, but I would imagine it would fit into PE, archery certainly would and there's synergy. I took Table Tennis to graduate. I don't think my engineering school where I got my BS required Physical Education though.
It's definitely not common. My US university required 2 physical education classes, but only if you were under 30 and hadn't served in the military. They may have offered marksmanship, but I just took running and soccer (aka football). The classes were graded pass-fail and didn't even count for academic credit.
My high school had some marksmanship trophy's in their case dating back to the 70s. Responsible gun ownership was a real thing when a sizable portion of the male population were veterans.
We have myriad available "electives" that contribute towards our degrees. I have college credit for "bowling and billiards" and "canoeing and kayaking".
I share the same name with a local TV star in my country. Even that is a PITA. Can’t imagine being named Mark Zuckerberg or Michael Jackson or anything like that.
At some point there were teenager girls calling me (no idea how they got the phone number). I started acting like they called the right person and there would be happy screams on the other hand. I guess the high point was that. I decided that might not be a good idea though. Would definitely continue if my “fans” were middle aged men.
I seem to recall when he was on TV he leaned into the joke ("not that Michael Jackson"). Of course that was long before the days random people could send abuse on Twitter.
Most alternatives being talked about are working on query strings (like `$.phoneNumbers[:1].type`) which is fine but can not be easily modeled / modified by code.
Things like https://jsonlogic.com/ works better if you wish to expose a rest api with a defined query schema or something like that. Instead of accepting a query `string`. This seems better as in you have a string format and a concrete JSON format. Also APIs to convert between them.
Also, if you are building a filter interface, having a structured representation helps:
I use httpie (not httpie actually, https://github.com/ducaale/xh but it has the exact same ux). For the life of me, I can't remember curl flags for some reason. Even fucking -X POST... Sending JSON is pain too.
For quick and easy http requests, httpie has been fantastic.
Since this is old, I assume someone found these photos and then manually selected the pointer location. Maybe used openCV or something like that.. But I'd most likely go with manual.
Yeah probably. It likely made it significantly easier given that the images are always super zoomed in, so a single finger pointing covers roughly 6-8 mouse pointer locations (I'm kind of eye-balling it here).
