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There are plenty of folks around who will buy the new pro machines who are using, say, Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Shake. A lot of high end 3d software is probably going to be announced jointly with any new pro machines (e.g. Maya, Lightwave; Blender just released an Intel binary). Unity has been universal for a few months now.

I came across something called Unity a while back. Apparently it can work as a plugin for dashboard widgets, web pages, or be used to make full-screen games on the Mac or Windows platforms. The site says you use JavaScript, C#/Mono or Python for programming. Using runtime compiling languages seems strange if you're going to program a game that uses 3D because of speed, but somehow this thing manages. The thing I noticed is that it uses the Ageia physX Physics Engine. I suppose it is just a software implementation if you don't have the hardware, but I also think that if you have the card installed in your system, this 3D engine uses it automatically and transparently. I have no idea how good this is for 3D games, but I tried out the demonstration game and it seemed alright, at least for navigating through a 3D scene.

I came across something called Unity a while back. Apparently it can work as a plugin for dashboard widgets, web pages, or be used to make full-screen games on the Mac or Windows platforms. The site says you use JavaScript, C#/Mono or Python for programming. Using runtime compiling languages seems strange if you're going to program a game that uses 3D because of speed, but somehow this thing manages. The thing I noticed is that it uses the Ageia physX Physics Engine. I suppose it is just a software implementation if you don't have the hardware, but I also think that if you have the card installed in your system, this 3D engine uses it automatically and transparently. I have no idea how good this is for 3D games, but I tried out the demonstration game and it seemed alright, at least for navigating through a 3D scene.

As long as I have my Unity engine and a computer in front of me, I'll make the game I want to make and will be uncensored. The rest of the world can shove off. Don't be scared, folks, the Indies will make it all right.

There are a number of cross-platform commercial applications that run on Mono, for example:

* Novell's own iFolder client and servers (same code base, modulo UI which is native on each of the three platforms: Linux/Gtk, Windows/Winforms, Cocoa/OSX).

* (http:///www.medsphere.com) Medsphere's products (Mono/Gtk# based).

* Otee's Unity game engine (http://www.otee.dk/index.html).

You can look for the "Works with Mono" logo on open source .NET applications and various commercial applications.

For a larger but still incomplete list, see:
http://www.mono-project.com/Software

As for your question about what will happen when C# 2.0 comes out, we have good news, we already have implemented it (we are missing two fairly minimal features though), for details you can see our web page on the subject:

http://www.mono-project.com/CSharp_Compiler

Generics, itereators, anonymous methods, nullable types, partial classes, per-accessor modifiers, static classes, fixed buffers and co/contra-variant delegates are all implemented and available today.

And we can not wait to implement the new features in C# 3.0

Miguel.

As for the language, we used Python in Unity http://www.otee.dk/ for the initial preproduction of GooBall. It was soooo slow. After that we switched to Mono. CPU usage in the scripting logic went for >40% to app. 5%... If you like the Python syntax, you can always include boo http://boo.codehaus.org/ which mimics Python very closely, but uses type inference to get type safety automatically. On another note: the article states that Unreal does not use microthreads. That is not correct.

As a game developer, I'll say it'll come sooner than you think. Engines such as Unity will support Aegia's PPU when it comes out as it already uses the Novodex engine. From there it would take about 15 minutes to set up, tops. Expect some awesome things to come from little Indie developers.