Smart pointers instead of GC?

[Nick Sabalausky]

On 2/1/2014 3:20 AM, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>
> Meanwhile Unity and similar engines are becoming widespread, with C++
> being pushed all the way to the bottom on the stack.
>
> At least from what I hear in the gaming communities I hop around.
>
> What is your experience there?
>

It's not uncommon for Unity-engine games to drop down to C++ to optimize 
bottlenecks. Somewhat of a pain since you have to deal with the CLR <-> 
unmanaged marshalling mess. (I do really wish Unity would expose an 
optional C/C++ API so you wouldn't need a pointless CLR layer sandwiched 
between the C++-based engine and any non-CLR game code...)

Keep in mind too that while Unity is certainly powerful, the games 
written with it aren't usually the ultra-AAA titles (like Battlefield, 
Crysis or Last of Us, for example) where a major part of the business is 
"wow everyone with never-before-seen technical achievements or risk 
failing to recoup the gigantic development costs".

Come to think of it, I wonder what language Frostbite 3 uses for 
game-level "scripting" code. From what I've heard about them, Frostbite 
3 and Unreal Engine 4 both sound like they have some notable 
similarities with Unity3D (from the standpoint of the user-experience 
for game developers), although AIUI Unreal Engine 4 still uses C++ for 
game code (unless the engine user wants to to do lua or something on 
their own). I imagine Frostbite's probably the same, C++, but I haven't 
actually heard anything.