UDK 4.0 Editor

Boot Camp was made by a brazilian studio. Unity can always pay someone to build a demo again.

 

I suppose that this is the new demo

 

Nope

3.4+ is angrybots, 3.0 - 3.3 is bootcamp

 

I have just learnt that new unreal engine 4 will be 100% C++ finally, so that's a very good new for me who just want to implement AI and not graphics or physic things.

- As Unity is very good but still in C# and I'd rather prefer C++, does it worth waiting for the unreal 4 to at last be able to code in C++ ?

- what is the unreal devkit release date ?, no information about it



PS: the title has nothing to do with Miles

 

WTF are you talking about? Just write a C++ plugin for Unity... Especially for AI, Unity gives you everything you need to write C++ plugins LOL.

June 24, 2013 17:00 UTC

 

I thought it was scheduled for June 24, 2013 1:45 PST

 

C++ does not convert to productivity. Its a known limitation of it and the reason why it was replaced in the business world by .NET and JAVA. C++ is only used for high performance or low level stuff, but not for business logic and game scripting is definitely business logic.

UE4 won't replace it with C++ finally, they will just kick out unrealscript as an option. but the rest was always there, UE was always programmed in C++ and so were most games that used the UE engine.
UnrealScript was only the 'limits' for UDK and Modding cause UE never exposed the SDK hooks.
So with UE4 the modding community will either need to learn a new modding SDK (a la valve) or use Kismet which will remain there too.

For UDK I see no future path that includes the replacement of UnrealScript with C++ cause it would completely disintegrate their deployment workflow. If they allow C++ in udk, people expect to be able to add native code which is inherently impossible with the LLVM cross compilation to iOS especially. So in the end you get a much uglier syntax for the scripting (C++ instead of basically anything on earth) with no gain on the native level for mobile or flash targets - these are limits that UE licensees don't have as they can integrate it natively

 

This is where you are wrong...

 

Hmm that certainly changed with C++11. But anyway you are right C++ does not translate to productivity, but it can. You just need like a PhD degree in C++ engineering... And that's the reason why Java and C# are preferred for anything they can be used for effectively.

I mean they are definitely going to have like C# or something, even if the community has to create it, so...

What are you talking about ^^? I don't really get what you are trying to say. Why would adding native code be impossible? LLVM is nothing special?! You just need the source code to everything, or a C-interface.

 

dreamora : thanks for you precisions. Even if anyway I don't totally agree with all of it.
Coming from C++ makes me wonders (90 % of AI books,papers, codes and examples are in C++) I just asked as switching to C# implies some extra work for me:

- porting from JavaScript to C# as most of the unity doc is in JS, as also porting all my C++ base code sources to it
- even if performance is not important for me, when going AI this come quickly to the place, and C# . As an example cf the update notice in http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/118015/Fast-A-Star-2D-Implementation-for-C who talks about perfs and some trouble with PQueues in C#

ImogenPoot: maybe you can , but I don't have a Unity pro. version to be able to use C++ plugins and waypoints

This being said, I'm far to wish to add some trolling subject, instead I'm asking before spending hours/days to a new environment, tools,language .

 

Simple, because their cross compiler can not include iOS frameworks without getting Epic sued to hell by apple for copyright inf as such they can not expose any iOS interfacing, support ObjC etc, which means that you get C++ but can not make use of C++ - ObjC to finally expand the absolutely limited UDK iOS experience to something real, something thats iOS focused.
Or in short: you can not do more with it on mobile than you can right now as you can still not expand it with native iOS capabilities.

Thats one of the major benefits of Unity and Shiva, they both offer native plugins on mobile cause they comply to the platform makers requirements on how to deploy to these platforms where as Adobe and Epic both violate that with their LLVM cross compilers and hence will never get plugin capabilities without alienating users by changing the workflow to require XCode and OSX for build deploy (Unity and Shiva require them too, but they don't alienate someone as that always has been a requirement. Unity does not even allow iOS project selection outside of OSX and Shivas UAT does the same for iOS deployments as shiva has no concept of platform within the editor and scripting at dev time, only at deploy time)


@doubitchou: Thats incorrect on the documentation. Since Unity 3 the documentation is in all 3 languages. The toggle switch is just not always that obvious and it does not remember the decision unluckily.

And AI actually complies to both, low level and high performance needs so that its done in C or C++ makes perfect sense though for Unity you would likely still use C# for cross platform usage as C++ will not go everywhere and will commonly require to jump through one or more hoops depending on the platform - but naturally there are cases where its absolutely unavoidable. The price can just be high cause you can only debug them in a very limited scope the moment they hit unity so you need multiple environments and test sets to ensure that it does its job unless you invest in a unity source license.

But just to mention that: Keep in mind that for example AI heavy games like supreme commander and supreme commander 2 implement their AI in the scripting layer with only the heavy math bound lifting under the hood (as the data passing between the native and VM environment is and will remain the really deadly thing to the performance with nowadays high end VMs and JIT compilation in place), so its possible to seperate the 'low level core' from the 'business logic' aspect to get the benefits of both which is in your and your designers favor unlike C++ which only suites the hardcore hackers on the team

 

About the documentation I didn't got what you said. For example I really need some visibility information, does player1 sees P2 ? so I go to : http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Physics.Raycast.html which is nicely documented but always in JS . Ok the transformation is not that difficult, but I don't see the "toggle swtich" you talk about to avoid me the research for C# which I already have to understand itself, in addition to Unity API logic.

In regard to the C++ implementation while I don't care to cross compile as intend to use the AI testbed for experiments on PC mostly, therefore iOS, Android and such are out of my considerations. Nevertheless, what you say about C++ porting is also true, with mobiles for example: try to code C# on Black Berry,Symbian, etc as I could use Qt on them with C++.

For the implementation via Math intensive coding everybody can do however his choices guide him/her. Even, more or less AI get into math : as I intend to use genetic algorithms and neural nets, these use maths behind also, this is just about "engine" is working not which script or language have been used for it.

As a beside (positive) note : I just discovered that messaging (message passing) is already implemented in unity , so I don't have to recode it or use some complex Windows Server API framework.

 

@doubitchou: Click on the small triangle on the top right above the code where it says Javascript and select C#. The web version will even remember the change in setting.
Yes it won't change the function header but the sample will point out those handfull of cases where it differs (due to out / ref keyword or cause its an async operation which always means yield return)


And good to hear that you found the messaging part

 

great !
now I can dig better.

thx

 

@dreamora,
Not all Unity documentation is in C#, I've found lots of document pages only in JS. Though isn't hard to understand if you are experienced with other programming languages.

 

Psychoz : that's what I wanted to point at, but as I didn't got trough enough doc.

Besides, September will see a new Unity coding book in C# (really this time) no information let know what it will be about, hope that it will have interesting subject that I can't pick from .Professional Unity and C# (1118063376)

 

Awesome, C++ is a good idea, vast majority of game programming jobs ask you for C++ , even for unity programmer jobs they ask for C++. I see most Unity jobs are for mobile. We will have to see Unity 4 vs UDK 4 but i think Unity will go even more to mobile market. Pity none engine gives you free time to learn them.

 

Hopefully Unity 4 will have some support for BPTC (BC7) texture compression in the future, as its quality is much higher than DXT1/5 and Intel have just released the source of a very fast compressor (it used to take forever to compress) which can also do realtime DXT1 compression.