Managed C++

added later: this very much depends on your feedback so please do let

us know which languages are most important to you.

So what does "only supporting C#" actually mean?

On Windows, the XNA Framework assemblies are just regular managed DLLs,

so you could reference them from a Managed C++ or VB .NET project and

use our API without any trouble.

But if you want to use IDE features like the game component designer or

the content pipeline, those are currently only available inside C#

Express. You could use C# Express to build your game content and then

some other version of Visual Studio to build the code, but that

wouldn't exactly be convenient!

On Xbox, things are more limited. Both Visual Basic and Managed C++

depend on runtime components which we have not yet had time to port to

the Xbox version of CLR, so you cannot use these languages at all to

develop Xbox games.

ShawnHargreaves at 2007-8-30 >

By "game content" you're refering to things like Art assets? Can you explain what the game component designer is (and why I may want to use it)?

Personally I would prefer C++, not because of any deep aversion towards C#, but for very practical reasons. Beyond the performance implications my concerns are similar to exal's, in that I have a vast array of different libaries and utilities I've created using C++ in mind and spending the time to port those over to C# would be very detrimental time wise. Porting hundreds of thousands of lines C++ code to C# would be a big pain and would completely turn me away from the prospect of developing for Game Studio. On the other hand, allowing me to do something similar to what vertigo did with the Quake 2 Managed C++ project would be perfectly acceptable.

As far as performance, I would generally prefer the increased efficiency of C++ but obviously I'm not crazy about performance in opposition to a strong feature set (or I'd be asking for C :-). Managed C++ would be perfectly fine in my eyes as long as tools support was geared towards both languages.

Evermind at 2007-8-30 >

What about common open source C++ libraries for collision detection and physics simulation?

I'm developing Bullet Physics Library, targeting improvements over Open Dynamics Engine (ODE) by supporting convex hull and continuous collision detection (time of impact/sweep).

Should we wait until we can have a C# wrapper for those existing C++ libraries? Is there a special repository for shared/common libraries for physics, sound etc?

Erwin Coumans

http://bullet.sourceforge.net

erwincoumans at 2007-8-30 >

Shawn Hargreaves wrote:

On Xbox, there is currently no way for you to use or call into Managed C++, so the only option is to rewrite the entire library in C#. That's not actually as horrific as it may sound: Garage Games did exactly this for their entire Torque engine and Marble Blast game code, and didn't find it anywhere near as painful as they were expecting.

Are there any tools that helps converting a C++ codebase into C#?

Do you have any links/books/recommendations that help converting C++ to C# for developers whose primary focus is not C#? Also, having to deal with an additional codebase adds maintenance :) Is there anyone who autogenerates C++ and C# with high level tools (like C++ autogeneration from UML tools like the roundtrip in Rational Rose)? Perhaps it's not so painful after all, but for SDK's who are still under development, anything that can be autogenerated can free up time that can be spend developing (fixing bugs, adding features). For multiplatform codebases, even autogeneration of projectfiles saves time. For that I'm now using CMake for example.

Thanks,

Erwin

erwincoumans at 2007-8-30 >