Create a native plugin for Unity3D / Questions

[roscopecoltran]

Hi,

Hope you are all well !

I wanted to test your interesting work to extend its use to build and automate writing of unity native plugins. (article about how to write native plugins for unity: http://www.alanzucconi.com/2015/10/11/how-to-write-native-plugins-for-unity/), and have some questions about CppPlugGen, CppPlug integration in a wider CMake external projects processing.

Context:

I wanted to create a native plugin from this repo, dlib, but the api is large and wanted to focus only to export this example, link, in Unity3D, and use its web-camera supports to test some facial recognition features.

After a couple of searches, I found CppSharp and and CppPlug, that I tested and posted a quick issue about the compilation of the project with the managed plugins support.

I wanted to use Hunter, a CMake package manager providing lots of interesting packages, and Polly, a collection of CMake toolchain files and scripts for cross-platform build and CI testing.

hunter:

• examples: https://github.com/ruslo/hunter/tree/master/examples)
• packages https://github.com/hunter-packages

polly:

• repo: https://github.com/ruslo/polly
• example: https://github.com/m039/XLIS/blob/master/Cpp-Cross-Platform/compile.sh

Questions

• Did you ever considered such use initially when you wrote CppPlug and CppPlugGen ?
• Do you think that CppPlug could help to automate native plugins writing for Unity3D, at least writing some of its components ? How would you see that ?
• Do you have more docs or instructions to build CppPlug or CppPlugGen to make it more fluent to bootstrap ? or maybe it should be wrapped into a docker image with onbuild instructions ? (example: Mono 4.6.2)

Have a great day and thanks for your input about that by advance !

Richard

[zillemarco]

Hi, thank you for your interest in this project! I'll try to answer to your questions in the best way I can, but first let me explain what I had in mind when I started these projects. CppPlug is a library I started to write to be used inside my company to make one of our products extendible with pulgins written in many different languages. C and C++ were easy, but we wanted to give our developers and customers the possibility to use higher level languages. Looking for a solution I found out that using the Mono library, a lot of such languages come almost free (C#, Python and JavaScript due to their C# bindings IronPython and IronJS, etc.), so I started looking for a way to automatically build a bridge from C++ to C#. Googling a bit I found CppSharp and started writing CppPlugGen to use CppSharp to build these C++ to C# bridges automatically. After some work the CppSharp guys contacted me to bring my CppPlugGen inside CppSharp itself so I discontinued working on CppSharpGen and worked on CppSharp.CLI which is basically CppPlugGen with a different name.

Now, to actually answer to your questions:

• maybe I misunderstood the question but, like I said earlier, I started writing CppPlug and CppPlugGen to make the life easier to a C++ developer who wants to make its software extensible with many languages. I can't say more than this, if you explain what you actually mean with "such use" I can be more precise for sure :)
• No, I've never thought about writing native plugins with CppPlug, but it could be interesting :)
• Unfortunately no, I don't have any more docs to build CppPlug and CppPlugGen. What I can tell you is that you should check out CppSharp.CLI for sure since it is more updated (I dropped CppPlugGen to work on CppSharp.CLI) but it still lacks MacOS support for now. About CppPlug I've seen the issue on its repository and I'll be answering there ;)