Microsoft has announced expanded support in Visual Studio for game programmers by announcing greater interoperability with 3 of the major game engines available to developers: Unreal Engine, Unity, and Cocos2D. This expands on the previously released VS Tools for Unity and means that with Visual Studio Community, non-enterprise developers can write games using the Microsoft toolset at little to no cost.
Cocos2D-x is an “open-source game framework written in C++” and supports iOS, Android, Windows Phone, OS X, Windows, and Linux. It is licensed under the MIT license and the source code is available on GitHub.
Unity supports numerous platforms (Microsoft’s S. Somasegar lists 21 in his announcement) and by using the available Personal edition, developers can build games for Unity at no charge. Finally Unreal Engine 4 supports a similar wide variety of platforms and is offered with favorable licensing terms (in particular no cost to begin development) to independent developers that provides full access to the engine’s source code.
Somasegar notes that this support favors Community over the Express editions but extends to the paid editions as well. No details have been provided yet on what the tighter integration will yield for Coco2D-x or Unreal, but when reviewing the existing Unity toolset it would stand to reason that users can look for enhanced integrating debugging support, and the ability to easily navigate between your project code and the code that is part of the engine itself.
