GpuJeff
Noel BerryFNA (a port of XNA we used for Celeste) now officially supports consoles with C#'s NativeAOT. That means you can compile C# directly for consoles, which is something I've been looking forward to for years. Very exciting for the future of C# games!
For reference, most C# games running on consoles had to be transpiled to C++. Unity had IL2CPP, and Celeste and many other non-Unity games used a program called BRUTE. But with Microsoft supporting native C# compiling with NativeAOT that should not be required long term.
This was the main motivator for me to learn C++ to begin with - at the time the future of C#'s NativeAOT looked really uncertain and so I decided to just make games directly in C++ to make cross platform support easier.
Tabernero 🎮 Indiedev@noelfb Maybe this could be the first of many steps towards Godot being professionally used for console videogames.
jki@noelfb Can I ask what makes this different from the Moni AOT capabilities? If I understand correctly, Mono could also do full AOT and that’s how Xamarin could support iOS with it.
Is it a matter of performance? Or is it that Mono never supported console architectures properly? (Admittedly I have no idea what consoles require)
Vivi, The Heinous Witch@noelfb oh hell yeah, that's really exciting!
Alex Darby // darbotron🛹@noelfb without wishing to sound pessimistic, getting your game to compile & run on consoles is only a tiny part of putting a game out on consoles...
I've ported a lot of Unity games originally made for PC onto consoles & structural game logic changes needed to handle submission requirements (correctly handling users, save data, controllers, & associated errors) are usually the most time consuming parts of a port.
@noelfb I did a conference talk about this in 2015 (!) which covers a bunch of sturctural & architectural approaches you can take to make your life easier - hope this updated version from 2021 helps
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1spxZVyWg7phSMKRCUXpBMdwzJOvOlR_q/view?usp=drivesdk
@darbotron my point is not having to transpile C# code to C++ for porting is a huge step forward for C#. Trust me, I'm well aware that's not the only thing involved in porting games lol
@noelfb ah, fair enough.
I assume that something must still be doing transpiling from C# to C++, as none of the consoles have a C# API, but I guess it's handled in this FNA thing?
@darbotron In this case C#'s NativeAOT compiles the C# directly to machine code for the target platform. The C# framework/runtime are also ported and compiled using NativeAOT as far as I understand,
Sef 🌈@noelfb Very cool! I must pick up that C# 2D engine project I put aside the last time I changed jobs.
Baggers@noelfb
That's pretty incredible!
That's pretty incredible!