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C# in Unity 2026: Writing more modern code

68 points by hacker_13

by Fred27

2 subcomments

As a primarily C# developer who has done some game engine work, I recently gave Godot a go for licensing reasons. Apart from some quirkiness I'm fairly impressed. Much nicer C# support compared to Unity. I've done a fair bit of Unreal C++ but to be honest unless you really need the performance that's just too much hard work.
Having said that getting the code working properly with a nice 3D UI is my priority, not having a slick game with some code doing some mundane stuff in the background.

by tryfinally

1 subcomments

Fans of LINQ may enjoy ZLinq[0], which is a less versatile but much more performant way to write LINQ-like queries. I certainly use a lot of (Z)Linq in my code; the performance tradeoff is just fine for one-off initialization, UI code, editor tooling, etc.
[0]: https://github.com/Cysharp/ZLinq

by weli

16 subcomments

A lot of game devs are terrible programmers. A friend of mine 10 years ago asked me for help with his Unity project. He is not a tech savvy person but we both took programming in high school, enough for him to make small games with a lot of tutorials and stack overflow.
His codebase was horrible, a lot of logic that I would have already though of abstracting away. For example saving dialogs on json files and the conditions for that dialog to trigger for that NPC as some sort of finite state machine that can be represented with a series of sequential flags. He had a single file that was about 15k lines full of `if (condition && condition) || (condition && condition)` statements. He didn't seem to see the issue, it just worked.
That's when I understood some people just care about game development and doing cool stuff and don't care at all about programming, good practices or structured code. And that's perfectly fine.

by Surac

0 subcomment

I started using .Net with 2.0, learned the api and framework and was very happy with all the functions. i never had the need to switch to the more idiomatic idoms. Sometimes on the go i picked up some new tricks and adopted some new types. Form me a good programmer knows how to avoid cognitive overload and how things work under the hood. Why use LINQ when i can use a foreach or a hashmap. Most of the time people don't understand how i get so much performance out of C#, then i tell them KISS. And know your type system.

by m_w_

1 subcomments

Some nice tips in here ([field: SerializeField] for example) - but as others note, it's not about modern code, as many of these features have been available for an embarrassingly long time. It's always felt to me that there's some fundamental friction between idiomatic C# and Unity.
I remember, after reading about new features C# 8.0, someone wrote that C# 9 would write all your code for you, and that C# 10 would just mail you a check every month. How the times have changed...

by drzaiusx11

0 subcomment

I am not a game developer (I've made a few in the past but didn't use any frameworks besides direct libsdl calls), but if this article rings true for anyone in that field I'm a bit surprised things as basic as properties, structs and tuples are "not used" by unity devs, this is some basic stuff that has been supported even by Mono for decades. Just basic syntactic sugar though, so not a big deal either way. Just surprising to me at least.

by raincole

2 subcomments

Unity's C# has always felt like C#'s mentally challenged cousin. C-not-so-sharp. The custom == convinced me that allowing operator overloading on built-in operators is one big mistake.

by tancop

0 subcomment

c# 14 added field backed properties where you dont need that `_health` in the first place you just write `public int Health { get => field; set => field = Mathf.Clamp(value, 0, 100)`. that way you never accidentally use the internal field without the checks. problem is unity still stuck on c# 9.0 so it might be years before you can actually use this in a game

by ethin

0 subcomment

I prefer Godot over Unity honestly. Not just because the engine feels better but because it's accessible, which is what matters to me. Unity isn't and probably never will be, so meh. Sure you can make accessible games in it but the editor itself isn't accessible so it kinda defeats the point of being able to make accessible games in it in the first place. And don't even get me started on Unity's licensing model. Godot's superior C# support is, IMO, just a cherry on top.

by brainwipe

0 subcomment

I code modern C# during the day and Unity for fun and I found this a really good roundup.
It's also worth noting that Unity does all sorts of OO-breaking filth before passing to IL2CPP.

0 subcomment

by coinfused

1 subcomments

Looking forward to when Unity will migrate to CoreCLR. Soon!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_t6xVfrmEWU

by DarkNova6

2 subcomments

What C# version does Unity currently support? 2024 I chose Godot over Unity due to its better C# support and I can’t say that I came to regret my decision.

by everyone

2 subcomments

I'm a very experienced Unity C# programmer, and I certainly don't equate "good" with using all the new fancy features of a language.
Fancy features are less maintainable imo. Less programmers will know about them and they're less likely to have equivalents in other languages.
Making something more exotic / confusing / hard to parse is defo not worth saving a few lines of code.. I'd much rather see a longer function using absolute bog standard elements of the language (and thus being clear, easy to comprehend for everyone, easy to modify at any point) rather than a super short, super "elegant", super "clever" solution.

by journal

0 subcomment

idk, maybe the youtube algorithm just gets people to click on the video, what do they care why a video is clicked on as long as it generates revenue. so when they talk about videos being useful, take that to the bank.

by moron4hire

1 subcomments

Game developers are not paid to be good developers. They're paid to be young, naive, and easily brow-beat into working unpaid overtime.
I think one of my biggest problems with Unity is that it enabled a massive market of me-too "business men" who "employ" unpaid and underpaid interns to hack together asset-store-ware they then dump on the app stores. When a gem game stutters, people blame their crappy phones rather than the company who probably stiffed its developers.
I've seen a lot of my friends do this constant churn of signing up for the next game shop that will hire them. Places that throw many, many red flags the second you even walk in the door. They work hard to get a game done on a budget 1/10th what it should be, the game ends up being a flop, and they never get a chance to grow their portfolio or skills to eventually get a better job.
This isn't something you can lay at the feet of Unity Technologies, but I do think it is a reason to avoid Unity: the job ecosystem is just awful.

by shevy-java

5 subcomments

> The Unity engine has evolved a lot in modern days, but I noticed a trend where Unity developers are still using "outdated" techniques when writing their C# code.
Some years ago I tried to get into C# + Mono. Eventually I opted for Java instead, for many reasons; I'll skip that here.
C# is very strange to me. In a way I feel that C# belongs like Java in the same "post C++" family; C kind of paved the way, C++ was messy and powerful, so Java and C# would be more "managable". But I never got into C#. Java is not a pretty language, it is also quite boring, but modern Java is somewhat acceptable - you get the job done. And it is not an extremely difficult language either for the most part, just with an addiction on pointless verbosity. C# is ... strange though. TIOBE has it ranked #5 right below Java, so there must be many C# users, but I don't get to see them really in the Linux ecosystem. So where are these people all? Using Windows only? When the question is "most developers don't use feature xyz", do all of them actually KNOW these features? You can still find many java tutorial where people use archaic ways to, for instance, iterate over a collection. Perhaps it is similar to the C# ecosystem, people are slow to adopt. Or, and this may also be a reason, people could have moved to other languages. This may not be a huge percentage, but you see that some languages suddenly struggle with old devs and failing to get new devs (ruby is in this problem right now; it may overcome it but right now it is sinking hard, even though I would reason that the language is, for the most part, better than it was in, say, 2010).

by leloctai

0 subcomment

Doesn't hn clean article titles? This is a classic click baity one. Most of these are just basic features. Some are unused for good reason.
- Property: the inspector doesn't call your getter or setter. I do use them still because i like to centralize my validation logic. But need custom machinery to make them behave consistently.
- Tuple: well-known. Good but only in moderation.
- Linq: people avoid it due to allocations, not runtime. While it is possible to avoid dynamic alloc, it is not obvious and best avoided. Also the point about the linq syntax being "cleaner" is debatable.
- Record: good. Lesser known as it's the newest in the article. No footguns like the other.
While it is nice that this is human written, the seo format is nearly as annoying as those ai articles.