Newcomer question on the .NET factor

Scripting
#1

Hi all,

I found Flax while researching the various C/C++ -based 3D engines/libs of the “Linux-able, source-avail-or-open, maintained, has more than just basic draw-call wrappers” kind (ie. some terrain story, some physics story, some PBR & post-FX story etc.)

I almost dropped Flax from my list of candidates due to .NET here. But then the many rave-reviewy comments on Flax in the GamesFromScratch YT channel’s Flax vids made me reconsider.

So here I am to ask how deeply this “infests” the system as a whole (at runtime! never mind edit time), assuming one wishes to program all gameplay logics in C++.

The known: I understand I can “script” / code a game purely in C++ from VSCode with presumably F5-running, never needing to see or read or write or call C#. So far so good. (I don’t care for editor/GUI here for the things I want to explore/experiment, where code-first/code-only is anyway the sole story.)

Question 1: does .NET Framework then constitute a client-system dependency? Shipping a Linux release build to a buddy to beta-test, do they need to pacman -S dotnet or sth. For that matter: do hypothetical future “end users”? (Ie. actual players. Hi mom! :grin:) — ie. I don’t know whether nowadays “.NET AOT” means native-binary compile outputs.

Question 2: runtime garbage collections possible from the “managed” side, when not C#-scripting? — ie., does the engine’s core runtime codebase (ignoring both editor and build system, but meaning the release-shipped game-running code paths), depend on or call into .NET APIs or its own (if any) C# code-base parts?

These aren’t deal-breakers necessarily, rather I just want to intuit this better as I start to work things out with Flax from C++ & VSCode.

#2
  1. End users will need to have .NET, but I believe Flax has an option to package .NET with your game.
  2. A large majority of the codebase does not rely on C# stuff. Your C++ code will have C# bindings generated for it but they don’t get used outside of the editor as far as I know. There are some ManagedScriptingObjects in the codebase, namely Assets, which can be garbage collected from C#-land. Also, Flax’s builtin UI system is dependent on C#.