The open source UnrealCLR project was just awarded an Epic MegaGrant. The Epic MegaGrant program was first announced back at GDC 2019 and consists of a $100M fund for supporting game and media development. Previous recipients have included Blender, Godot, RayLib, Laighter, ArmorPaint, Krita and more.
The UnrealCLR project (we previously covered including a small getting started tutorial) brings CLR or Common Language Runtime support to Unreal Engine. In a nutshell this enables C# and F# developers to develop in those languages in Unreal and even gives debugging and blueprint integration support. Even better it is implemented as a plugin so you do not have to build UE4 from source code. In their own words, UnrealCLR is described as:
UnrealCLR is a plugin which natively integrates .NET host into the Unreal Engine with the Common Language Runtime for direct execution of managed code to build a game/application logic using the full power of C# 9.0, F# 5.0, and .NET facilities with engine API. The project is aimed at stability, performance, and maintainability.
Details of the MegaGrant were announced on Twitter:
Congratulations to the UnrealCLR team! UnrealCLR is an open source project that is available here on GitHub under the LGPL license. You can learn more about UnrealCLR and the Epic MegaGrant program in the video below. If you want to get started with UnrealCLR we recommend you start here for more details.