C# Implementation Plans?

[wh01683]

Hello.. I downloaded this today and was disheartened to find out how annoying it is to work between C# and gdscript. Unfortunately my project is entirely in C#.
I've had some difficulty even just getting the test demo working, interfacing between C# and gdscript. Do you personally think it's worth using this in a C# project or would it cause too many headaches?

Alternatively, do you have any plans to translate this to C# for performance reasons? If you translated this to C# and improved documentation I personally would have no problem paying $50 for it and I'm sure others would feel the same.

[scriptsengineer]

Sorry for the long delay in responding, after version 1.0.0 I put the main scripts for C++, in gdextension, I don't know if this solves the problem, as I don't program in C#, once you test it, let me know if it works?

[Glitshy]

In case someone else finds this useful: I have been able to generate C# wrappers using this:

https://github.com/Delsin-Yu/CSharp-Wrapper-Generator-for-GDExtension

There were some minor errors which prevented the generated wrappers from compiling but I was able to fix these manually.

[scriptsengineer]

Do you think it is valid to put something here in the lib?

[Glitshy]

The generated files are simply a bunch of .cs files which might help some people, but there are some significant caveats:

• Using it is awkward. For example, as described in the documentation of the Wrapper Generator, you can't just cast from one type to another. For example, you can't cast a node to GridInventory but instead have to use the Bind() method.
• Inheritance seems to not work properly (also related to why the Bind() method is required in the first place). I tried implementing a new class inheriting from GridInventoryConstraint (CategoryGridInventoryConstraint, analog to the .gd version), but trying to assign an Array of type GridInventoryConstraint to the inventory.GridConstraints yields an error if that array contains this custom type defined in C#. While the IDE and building the project looks fine, at runtime it is not recognized to inherit from that type.

Especially the second point means that it is not possible to achieve everything which usually works in GDscript also in pure C#. A lot of stuff still works and I am currently using that approach in my project, but for using e.g. the CategoryGridInventoryConstraint one probably has to call GDscript from C#.

If you believe it is useful, with this information in mind, should I create a PR adding a GDExtensionWrappers folder?

I am also currently trying to build this as a module rather than a GDextension, which means I can then generate the C# bindings the same way as for the core of the engine. This way everything would work completely, but that of course would be a custom Godot build. At the moment I'm still struggling with how the SCsub has to look like for the module.

[scriptsengineer]

Yes, you can create it, the idea is to put it in a specialized branch of C#.

About hierarchy, maybe it's my lack of knowledge, but isn't it a limitation of C#?

[Glitshy]

I created a PR, I hope that it's correctly setup.

When working with default Godot types in C#, inheriting and casting works flawlessly. For example, when I call GetParent() it returns a Node, which I can then cast to other types which inherit from Node, e.g. Node3D. If it isn't actually a Node3D, it will simply return null.

With these bindings, trying this always returns null when it is a type from a GDExtension, Therefore, the Bind() method has to be used (which utilizes ClassDB).