Update USharp To UE 4.24

[Tanner555]

I haven't tested these changes in a real project or tried packaging. These changes allow USharp to compile with the latest Unreal Engine 4.24 update. A new project will open just fine, and generated code now compiles with no errors.

If you are updating your copy of USharp with these changes, I'd recommend deleting the "USharp/Binaries/Managed/Modules" folder and compile plugin installer again before opening it.

[xtreampb]

should we have this merged into a new branch? perhaps have a release branch for each targeted version?

[danielmeza]

@xtreampb and @Tanner555 Look like this repo is not maintained. We can create a new repo?

[xtreampb]

@danielmeza i mean this is the second repo aimed at impementing C# for UE. It also died. The sad truth is without a dedicated team to keep things updated, community projects will typically die out, or Unreal decides to add C# support. Technically yes we can fork this and pull in the PR but I'm concerned that it might just die out again. If @Tanner555 wants to maintain it then thats fine with me

[Tanner555]

I did contact pixeltris (USharp owner) asking if he wanted to merge my 4.24 PR. He says he'd rather focus all of his resources on updating USharp to UE 4.25 and beyond. That would take an enormous amount of work due to the change of UObject.

This was several months ago, and since then, a new project called UnrealCLR has gained a lot of attention.
https://github.com/nxrighthere/UnrealCLR
UnrealCLR is very similar to USharp. It's more streamlined and doesn't allow blueprint inheritance of c# classes. You have to load all your c# method calls manually through a few blueprint nodes, and it's no where as convenient as USharp. Although this inconvenience allows UnrealCLR to bypass a lot of issues scripting plugins typically have when trying to balance blueprint convenience and runtime stability.

At this point, I wouldn't expect USharp to ever have a major update again. But the technology behind USharp is still very useful, just like many other abandoned plugins on Github.

[xtreampb]

@Tanner555 I haven't looked at UnrealCLR, but from what you mentioned about the restriction of not being able to create blueprint classes based from C# classes, for me, I think it is a deterrence. I have a partner who is a graphic artists more. He would like to be able to tweak things but doesn't know anything about programming. He would need to be able to control a few things via blueprints. Am I able to use an aggregation data model, instead of a composition data model in blueprints of my C# classes?

[danielmeza]

@xtreampb I see that the blueprints approach of UnrealCLR is more like SkookumScript for Unreal, you have somo special nodes on blueprints to call Skookum functions and as @Tanner555 said this make easy to play with, for a non programmer user on Unreal this should be enough because the blue print can be done by another user and just wrapper in a sub node group so that the designer can bind nodes and forget about the functions behind those nodes.