[Mono-ue] A call to establish a C# / Mono development and build environment for the plugin

[David Ford]

I'm somewhat confused as to why each developer wishing to use C# "must"
recompile from source.  As far as I can see there's nothing compelling
within the Mono code that requires that each developer should rebuild for
their own specific machine or environment.

Can I suggest that the better (best) approach be that a virtualised build
environment be established within Xamarin or Unreal / Epic, and that a
single developer be tasked with updating the Mono plugin on each release of
the game engine (presumably the API's don't change between patches to point
releases - eg 4.7 + patch will be compatible with the plugin if 4.7 raw is
compatible.  This developer wouldn't be full time, but may perhaps spend a
day each month (or less, assuming straightforward compatibility between
releases).

At this stage there is potentially a vast amount of wasted effort having
every C# developer establishing a full Mono build environment and toolchain
for C#, when in fact most developers (including myself) simply want to
download the Mono plugin and add it to the UDK, then add our own C#
assemblies.

We currently have one developer spending several days simply getting a Mono
C# plugin environment to run, when in reality a pre-built Mono plugin would
have removed all of that needless effort, and reduced the time to hours at
most.

We would prefer to use Unreal rather than Unity, however at this stage I
may pull our Unreal development completely and switch our (early phase)
project to the Unity platform based solely on the lack of a simplified
development toolchain with C# / Mono.

Note that all the other code for our project (20 + C## projects, tens of
thousands of lines of code) are C#, and I see no reason to add a small
amount of C++ purely to support Unreal, and based solely on the fact that
recompiling the Mono C# plugin for each UDK release is non-core effort.

Best regards

David Ford
0421 659 552
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