Ubisoft has made its Sharpmake game dev tool open-source

The custom generator created by Ubisoft during the development of Assassin’s Creed 3 has officially been made open source and uploaded to a Github repository.

Ubisoft says Sharpmake is a C#-based generator for Visual Studio projects and solutions that was designed to generate projects with a “very large number of configurations very quickly.”

The tool itself could offer game developers an alternative to tools like CMake and Premake, specifically one that Ubisoft says generates 100 to 200 times faster and works well with both big C++ code bases and multiplatform projects.

Now, Sharpmake and its accompanying documentation have been made public on GitHub. Ubisoft’s Nicholas Fleury has shared a post and video on Reddit offering a basic introduction to the tool and detailing some of its benefits. 

In addition to its speed, Fleury notes that Sharpmake is also an easier tool for C++ programmers to pick up, is flexible thanks to its use of C#, has built-in support for FastBuild, and supports all consoles, though developers will need to work with platforms individually to enable each within Sharpmake.

The tool itself can be found on GitHub, courtesy of Ubisoft, alongside more details on its use and capabilities.