by Miguel de Icaza

An interview with Nicholas Francis from Otee, the makers of the Unity game development system.

The Unity folks have been reusing the Mono JIT engine as a game engine, here is a nice blurb about what Mono got them:

If I have to pull out a specific feature it would be our scripting interface: We use Mono to get C#, JavaScript and Boo languages in there for gamecode. This means you get a scripting language running incredibly fast (*footnote: Initially, we used Python for GooBall. With that we were spending 50% of the CPU time inside scripting code. When we switched to Mono, the same functionality dropped to 1-2% CPU usage - we were completely blown away with how fast it is.) so this is what you make your games in (we also have C++ plugins for people who are passionate about C++ or need to use an existing library). When you make a Mono class, all public variables show up in the inspector for easy modification. So basically, Scripts are 1st class citizens of Unity. We're also using Mono for extending Unity - It really is that good.

Hopefully, when I have some spare cycles (hahahaha) I would like to assist the Unity folks in porting their game engine to Linux.

Once we have a port to Linux, we could run most of the games unmodified (the only exception would be those that require C++ plugins), educational software, architecture and advertising software that is being built today with Unity.