Microsoft announced that Visual Studio is partnering with top game engine industry leaders – Unity Technologies, Epic Games and Chukong Technologies. With this partnership, Microsoft is going to make game developers life easy by providing required game development tools within their Visual Studio 2015 IDE. All the parties which Microsoft has tied up are premiere game engine providers – Unity Technologies who are the creators of Unity 3D, Epic Games who created Unreal Engine and Chukong Technologies,the creators of Cocos2d.
Cooperation to enrich Game Development Experience
In the past, Visual Studio had announced Visual Studio Tools for Unity – a free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich programming and debugging experience in using the Unity gaming tools and platform. With the partnership, Visual Studio would turn out to be one single IDE providing developers the choice, clubbing three different gaming platforms and their tools together, at one single place for maximum productivity.
Developers could experience all the forces together as all these engines are one of the most popular gaming platforms. Developers could expand on the existing cross-platform mobile development support by making full use of Visual Studio for Cordova (HTML), Xamarin (C#) and C++.
The three premiere game engines with which Visual Studio has partnered have their own feature-set that impresses game developers who use Visual Studio IDE:
- Unity supports 21 different platforms that includes Xbox One, SteamOS, OS X, iOS, Android, Windows, WebGL, Oculus Rift and GearVR.
- Unreal Engine 4 empowers developers to create and deploy various game projects across platforms like Windows, Xbox One, Playstation 4, OS X, iOS, Android, Linux, SteamOS, HTML5, Steam VR, Oculus Rift and Gear VR.
- Cocos2d provides support to web browsers and native platforms like OS X, Windows, iOS and Android.
Said Somasegar in this Visual Studio Blog,
I am excited to join forces with these game engines in targeting today’s most popular devices and platforms for both 2D and 3D gaming. Together, we will be working to deliver the best possible game development experiences to users of these engines from within the Visual Studio IDE, further unlocking game developer creativity and productivity.
These improvements are expected build upon joint work to make access to the engines and tools needed for game development available to a broader base of developers.
