Vote for Windows Standalone with Scripting Backend IL2CPP (MUCH better script performance)

Vote here https://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/windows-standalone-with-scripting-backend-il2cpp

Please

was wondering why this isn't anywhere on the road map, not even in research or development
is it because not many developers want this ?

 

Probably because IL2CPP will make it not possible for you to load assemblies at runtime for mods etc. They did promise a Mono upgrade for the editor and standalones though.

 

isn't the mono upgrade in the far off distant future

thought i remember one of the speakers at a Unite saying that they already had IL2CPP working on standalone but one needed to be on the platform they were building for

 

Im not really sure about that, maybe Unity thinks its better to quickly roll out IL2CPP to all platforms and give us the Mono upgrade faster than fix the problem with the need to be on the platform your building for.

Also microsoft recently acquired Xamarin which owns Mono so we might see the Mono upgrade come sooner since Unity and Microsoft are buddies.

 

remember hearing that somewhere too

wow! that's forward thinking of them

i hope this doesn't negatively effect the partnership

 

so it would be similar to the Windows Store IL2CPP process

do you know how many platforms are left before it

so upgrading Mono will happen before having a IL2CPP Windows standalone build option

 

@Tautvydas Zilys Thank you

feel a lot better having a general idea of whats happening with IL2CPP

 

I'd like to hear what's the current standing on IL2CPP for Windows standalone.

To the original response, I don't quite understand the concern of not being able to compile IL2CPP content on other than target platforms, that's hardly any kind of real issue for windows game developers.

All in all, I'm bit concerned that IL2CPP on Windows standalone isn't even mentioned on the official roadmap, is it not planned at all? Or if it's in some plans, would it be realistic to expect that to happen with Unity 2017?

 

Are you saying this is somehow currently possible?

 

As I understand it, Steam's DRM wrapper doesn't work with Unity games due to them being .NET applications. Would IL2CPP backend mean all Steamworks features should work?

 

Apparently not: https://steamworks.github.io/faq/

From the FAQ: "
Does the Steam DRM wrapper work with Unity or XNA/Monogame?
No it doesn’t. Unfortunately the Steam DRM wrapper does not play well with .NET applications such as Unity and your application will likely fail to start if it’s wrapped. Even if it does succeed and work for you it will often fail on other computers."

I've not used it so I can't speak from experience, but this seems to be a common thing I'm seeing when looking into it

 

I'm curious though, what is the real issue that prevents this feature to be implemented yet?

According to the old talk on 2015:

Unity staff has been running Windows standalone IL2CPP a long time already (video is from 2015) and only reason mentioned on the video is that IL2CPP windows standalone toolchain could only run on windows so cross-platform compiling wouldn't work.

I really struggle to understand that reason though as every team who dev a game for windows will have a computer that runs windows.

 

Just throwing it out there, but IL2CPP also makes it harder for hackers to reverse-engineer our hard work

So IL2CPP on standalone will be appreciated on that aspect too

 

soon™ sounds good

I wouldn't call it even hacking, you have to press a button and IL decompiler spits out all the source codes in human readable form

 

I know that many modders will hate IL2CPP but then again, it really should be up to the devs to make the call what parts of the codebase they share with the final game. At the moment, devs don't have that choice (besides sticking everything into unmanaged native dlls).

 

Really looking forward to this feature as well!

 

This sounds really good to me. We're working on an MMORPG which would greatly benefit from the extra performance and obfuscation that IL2CPP will offer in desktop builds!

 

soon™ = any year now

 

I want to have this, since all the codes of the Windows standalone games on the Unity are de facto open source (easy hacked). I also hope for better performance. Please do IL2CPP for standalone builds!!!

 

Hi Unity devs, any update at all by any chance?

 

Nice to see this now included in 2018.1 beta

Been playing around with it, I initially just got IL2CPP.exe crash but solved it by reinstalling VS2017.

 

While trying to link my own c++ code directly into Unity project (following setup found here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/windowsstore-plugins-il2cpp.html ) I don't actually get the Platform settings to show up for Windows standalone (no settings show under it so I can't even select x64), I only see the options for Unity Editor. Is this functionality implemented in 2018.1 beta and if not, will it be done for the final 2018.1?

I'm getting errors for unresolved external symbols for my native functions so it didn't include the files in build. When using external native DLL without __Internal, IL2CPP works but would prefer the internal method to minimize the overhead.

 

Thanks, I made a simple test project to go along with bug report, hope it helps. Case number 987026.

 

Hi there,

I would like to try the new IL2CPP on Windows build using Unity 2018.1.0b2. However, when I select it as the Scripting Backend, on the Build Settings it shows: "Currently selected scripting backend (IL2CPP) is not installed".

I uninstalled VS 2017 and installed it again with the Windows 10 SDK, VC++ 2017 v141 toolset, C++ profiling tools and Just-In-Time debugger. But it's still showing the same message on Unity ("Currently selected scripting backend (IL2CPP) is not installed"). Am I missing something?

 

It's needed to be selected from the list when you install Unity, it's one of the optional things in the list.
I think this is a separate installer for IL2CPP only for windows: https://beta.unity3d.com/download/7...dows-IL2CPP-Support-for-Editor-2018.1.0b2.exe

 

Missed that. Thank you

 

It's me again.

Tried making the build and got the following error:

Code (CSharp):

1. Unhandled Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Builder is unable to build using selected toolchain (MsvcDesktopToolChain) or architecture (Unity.IL2CPP.Common.x64Architecture)!

Tried changing the architecture to x86, and no luck:

Code (CSharp):

1. Unhandled Exception: System.InvalidOperationException: Builder is unable to build using selected toolchain (MsvcDesktopToolChain) or architecture (Unity.IL2CPP.Common.x86Architecture)!

Reinstalling VS2017 didn't do the trick neither.

Googling about it I found that Unity has fixed it before (5.5.1): https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases/5.5.1p3

Maybe it's back on the Windows IL2CPP version?

 

Make sure that c++ build tools are selected when you run the installer. Not sure if VS2017 selected those automatically, I know VS2015 made you pick those manually or you didn't get c++ building support.

 

Talking of which, might be worth changing the defaults from the Unity installer to include these tools when you install VS2017 with it. I think it's now silent install (I could remember it wrong) so users don't get the option to pick the c++ build tools with it.

This would avoid a lot of confusion amongs new users in the future as people have gotten used to that when they install unity and platforms, things just work out of the box.

 

I would suggest that the build process in Unity detect missing C++ tools and offer to install them for the user. A few tools I use do that and I found it quite helpful indeed.

 

Hmmm, are we supposed to be able to include .lib? I tested it again and Unity Editor doesn't even recognize the file type.

I'd essentially want to replace my native dll with something that gets compiled into final game dll but including each cpp and h separately is kinda tedious, so including just a static library would solve this (as I could use similar setup as now with the dll).

As a side note, .obj is not going to work either as unity thinks it's a mesh in that case.

 

Yeah, I guess it's tricky if you just allowed it out of the box, considering people might try all kinds of things with it. But I already thought about workaround to not having unity UI include the lib support. One could just throw in a dummy header that has something like

and it should do the job, unless you guys filter out this kind of preprocessor commands (I hope not).

 

@JoshPeterson @Tautvydas-Zilys any update on when we can expect line numbers in stacktraces for IL2CPP?

Thanks,
Tom.

 

Are line numbers expected to work in development builds using IL2CPP?