Earlier this year, both Epic Games and CryTech made their Unreal Engine and CryEngine available under an affordable subscription model. These are both very sophisticated game engines that power some high end and popular games.

We had previously helped Unity bring Mono as the scripting language used in their engine and we now had a chance to do this over again.

Today I am happy to introduce Mono for Unreal Engine.

This is a project that allows Unreal Engine users to build their game code in C# or F#.

Take a look at this video for a quick overview of what we did:

This is a taste of what you get out of the box:

• Create game projects purely in C#
• Add C# to an existing project that uses C++ or Blueprints.
• Access any API surfaced by Blueprint to C++, and easily surface C# classes to Blueprint.
• Quick iteration: we fully support UnrealEngine's hot reloading, with the added twist that we support it from C#. This means that you hit "Build" in your IDE and the code is automatically reloaded into the editor (with live updates!)
• Complete support for the .NET 4.5/Mobile Profile API. This means, all the APIs you love are available for you to use.
• Async-based programming: we have added special game schedulers that allow you to use C# async naturally in any of your game logic. Beautiful and transparent.
• Comprehensive API coverage of the Unreal Engine Blueprint API.

This is not a supported product by Xamarin. It is currently delivered as a source code package with patches that must be applied to a precise version of Unreal Engine before you can use it. If you want to use higher versions, or lower versions, you will likely need to adjust the patches on your own.

We have set up a mailing list that you can use to join the conversation about this project.

Visit the site for Mono for Unreal Engine to learn more.

(I no longer have time to manage comments on the blog, please use the mailing list to discuss).

Today, I want to share some news from the .NET Foundation.

Forums: We are launching the official .NET Foundation forums to engage with the larger .NET community and to start the flow of ideas on the future of .NET, the community of users of .NET, and the community of contributors to the .NET ecosystem.

Please join us at forums.dotnetfoundation.org. We are using the powerful Discourse platform. Come join us!

Advisory Council: We want to make the .NET Foundation open and transparent. To achieve that goal, we decided to create an advisory council. But we need your help in shaping the advisory council: its role, its reach, its obligations and its influence on the foundation itself.

To bootstrap the discussion, we have a baseline proposal that was contributed by Shaun Walker. We want to invite the larger .NET community to a conversation about this proposal and help us shape the advisory council.

Check out the Call for Public Comments which has a link to the baseline proposal and come join the discussion at the .NET Forums.