Silk.NET VS jMonkeyEngine

Genuine curiosity - what would be your motivation to use Java over C# here aside from familiarity (which is perfectly understandable)? The latter takes heavy focus on making sure to provide features like structs and pointers with little to no friction, you can even AOT compile it and statically link SDL2 into a single executable.

But either way, if you want to try it out, then all it needs is

- SDK from https://dot.net/download (or package manager of your choice if you are on Linux e.g. `sudo apt-get install dotnet-sdk-8.0`, !do not! use Homebrew if you are on macOS however, use .pkg installer)

- C# extension for VS Code (DevKit is not needed)

- SDL2 bindings: https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET

A couple other options than what has been suggested so far: - TerraFX.Interop.Windows. Raw, blittable, 1:1 bindings for all Win32, D2D/D3D11/D3D12 APIs (there's also a version with Vulkan bindings). As close to doing #include as you can get in C#. This is my personal favorite, I use it in my own ComputeSharp library, and transitively we use it in the Microsoft Store too 🙂 - Silk.NET another version of high-performance bindings, more opinionated than TerraFX and with some additional helpers to make it a bit easier to use.

Here is an example of using "releases" in GitHub: https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET/releases. Most repositories use releases and releases seem like they wpuld be appropriate for your repository too.

I've been looking at this. Is this similar to the UrhoSharp project you talk about? https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET

Have you looked at Silk.NET before?

Take a look at https://github.com/dotnet/Silk.NET . You should be able to use your existing rendering context with it. So you could use something like imgui (They have bindings for that) to render your UI. Or if you just start writing your rendering code, you could consider writing the whole rendering engine with it. I used it in the past for a game engine and performance is no problem for most of the usecases.

At the time of the check, the latest revision was the e584cb1 commit. We checked it using the static analyzer.

> Unfortunately, this is yet another open source game engine with too small a user base.

I wonder why some engines are seemingly destined for success and others... aren't.

Godot got really big, despite a somewhat similar feature set: https://godotengine.org/ (really nice 2D support, 3D rendering was worse until version 4, GDScript has both a nice iteration speed but also has gotten some criticism, while C# was a second class citizen in the earlier iterations)

Stride is really nice and seemed like it should have been the Unity replacement that people would look at, if it had gotten more attention and a community would have formed around it, like Godot's.

There's also NeoAxis which is way more Windows centric, but still seems to be getting updates and is comparatively easy to use, yet similarly never got popular: https://www.neoaxis.com/

Weirder yet, Java doesn't really have that many game engines out there, at least the likes of Unity/NeoAxis/Stride that have nice editors, despite the language being pretty nice. The closest I can think of is jMonkeyEngine which I donated some money in the past to, which is pretty usable but similarly niche: https://jmonkeyengine.org/

I occasionally watch videos on the Gamefromscratch YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@gamefromscratch/videos) and it surprises me that there are so many engines out there, but very few actually are in the public eye. If you don't go out of your way to look for other options, you will most likely only have heard of Unity and Unreal (or maybe also Godot in recent years). I wonder why that is.

There more `bare-metal` engines like https://jmonkeyengine.org/ (well it is not C++, it is Java based)...

jMonkeyEngine (Java, Open source): https://jmonkeyengine.org/

This project develops a cross-platform Subspace client and server written in Java. It was developed from scratch on the idea of extensibility and modularity. The server is based on modules/frameworks highly optimized for scaled, networked, grid-based, infinite world physics. The client is based on the JMonkeyEngine, a minimalistic modern developer friendly, open source, game engine

> Godot is one of those pinnacle FOSS projects that just totally impresses me, especially given the state its in now, with 4.0.

It is definitely one of the success stories, at least so far.

For example, there are projects like jMonkeyEngine (a game engine in Java, on top of LWJGL) that don't get as much attention and their movement forwards is way slower: https://jmonkeyengine.org/

There's also Stride 3D, which is a bit closer to Unity I'd say, which is still a really nice project, but is also limited in how much development can be done: https://www.stride3d.net/

Regardless, I wish all of those projects success and would still be glad if Godot could be one of the champions of open source game engines, perhaps as a viable and easy to use alternative to something like Unity for those who want that sort of thing, even in the professional development space eventually!

It is, or at least was, efficient. Java has a great game engine called https://jmonkeyengine.org/ that at the time could compete with Unity, not sure the status now. And LWJGL, the lower layer for ooengl, was quite nice to use and it is efficient to go that low level if you plan to do a game that does not fit the stereotypes in such game engines, as you will find yourself fighting the engine more than the actual game.

This seems interesting https://jmonkeyengine.org , how would I get started?