Xenko 3.0 Game Engine Released, Now Open-Source

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Xenko 3.0 Game Engine Released, Now Open-Source

Xenko, a promising game engine that was one of the early adopters of Vulkan and does support Linux, is now open-source and freely available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Xenko-3.0-Released

[shmerl]

Why C#? Garbage collected languages are a strange choice for game engines, especially focused on VR which has realtime requirements.

[sarmad]

Does the editor itself work on Linux?

[sarmad]

Why C#? Garbage collected languages are a strange choice for for game engines, especially focused on VR which has realtime requirements.

Yeah, I was wondering the same. My guess is that if the bottleneck is the GPU then putting some extra load on the CPU doesn't affect overall game performance. C# also has some support for stack allocations and gives the programmer some control over the garbage collector, so that helps in optimizations, though still not gonna match the performance of C++ and the likes.

[Luke_Wolf]

Why C#? Garbage collected languages are a strange choice for for game engines, especially focused on VR which has realtime requirements.

You do realize that Unreal is using a garbage collector with C++ right? Apparently the game engine companies are doing just fine with garbage collection.

[shmerl]

You do realize that Unreal is using a garbage collector with C++ right? Apparently the game engine companies are doing just fine with garbage collection.

If they made their own garbage collector that's deterministic, it's fine. But using general purpose garbage collector is a no go for real time requirements like VR.

[jonbitzen]

I had a quick look-see, and I think it is possible to deploy games for Linux built using Windows, I'll be very surprised if the Editor *ever* works on Linux. The build instructions indicate ".NET desktop" as one of the build requirements. Depending on what they use, it won't be supported by MS .NET for Linux (they only provided Core, and the other server-ish stuff which supports their goal to be more present in the server world), and although some of that stuff is in Mono, the support isn't great. A few years ago I tried to port another program which uses .NET desktop libraries (Open3Mod) to Linux, and concluded that it'd be a non-convergent process. I got Open3Mod to start up and do a little bit of stuff, but basically once I started Googling around for the issues, it looked like it'd be a bear of a process to get Windows .NET desktop libraries to run on Linux.

Incidentally, although Unity3D *does* have C# as it's scripting language, a few years ago they made a big deal of adding something to compile all that to native code to make it run better (it's called IL2CPP - intermediate language to C++). Likewise, UE4 has a visual scripting language called Blueprint which got the same treatment within the last year or so.

The issue driving it is that although average performance with managed runtimes is excellent, they are still not deterministic. You can have pauses (which are usually GC-related) which will cause a momentary frame drop, which I guess people don't want to see in a AAA game (I'm not that much of a conoisseur myself).

jonbitzen

[PackRat]

Does the editor itself work on Linux?

Xenko only work for making LInux games using windows.

[BeardedGNUFreak]

Absolute garbage.

And LOL at actually using C# in 2018...

[cb88]

Absolute garbage.

And LOL at actually using C# in 2018...

Going by your username you are probably ever so slightly biased ;-)

People even use VB.Net in 2018 believe it or not...