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

[Ryan Burnham]

While it’s understandable that there will still be issues because it’s a pre-release I have to admit about 90% of my time has been messing around just trying to get things to build properly. I’m not even getting to the point where I can start using you API to test things out. The turnaround time between rebuilds is painful when you’re trying to debug an issue. 

 

Are there actually changes to UE Editor to be able to support this plugin or is it just because we need to validate that we have access to the source to satisfy the Unreal Engine terms and conditions? If it’s just because of the licensing isn’t your git commit validation on your site enough to do this? It would be so much easier to be able to just copy some plugin dll’s into the right plugin folder and not have to worry about building everything. 

 

There are a few things this project needs to really help get this project moving.

1.       An easier and more reliable setup process 

2.       Better community, Popper forums so when someone is helped with an issue they it doesn’t disappear and might be useful for others. A wiki as mentioned could be good as well for examples. I recently joined the Unreal Engine 4 Dev Community channel in skype the other day. Maybe a Mono for UE channel would help connect people.

 

From: mono-ue-bounces at lists.ximian.com [mailto:mono-ue-bounces at lists.ximian.com] On Behalf Of Ali Scissons
Sent: Friday, 20 March 2015 12:25 AM
To: David Ford
Cc: mono-ue at lists.ximian.com
Subject: Re: [Mono-ue] A call to establish a C# / Mono development and build environment for the plugin

 

The plugin isn't complete and not ready for production use, not to mention the plugin requires changes with UE4 itself (thus the patches). However, not everyone is required to build UE4/plugin from scratch. Once it is built, you should be able to redistribute it to your other developers and only have them setup with C# related tools like Xamarin Studio and it's plugin.




Ali Scissons

 

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 7:34 AM, David Ford <davidfordaus at gmail.com <mailto:davidfordaus at gmail.com> > wrote:

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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