Outside of work, Nick loves to play and create games! These articles focus on various aspects of game development.
Why Consider Using Autofac With Unity3D? I think using a dependency injection framework is really valuable when you're building a complex application, and in my opinion, a game built in Unity is a great example of this. Using Autofac with Unity3D doesn't need to be a special case. I wrote a primer for using Autofac, and in it I discuss reasons why it's valuable and some of the reasons you'd consider switching to using a dependency container framework. Now it doesn't need to be Autofac, but I love the API and the usability, so that's my weapon of choice. Building a game can result in many complex systems working together. Not only that, if you intend to build many games it's a great opportunity to refactor code into different libraries for re-usability. If we're practicing writing good code using constructor…
Graphs and Trees to Start I was chatting with my colleague about generating maps for a 2D role playing game the other day after getting super excited explaining picking ProjectXyz back up and looking into Unity3D more. He was expressing interest in algorithms for procedural generation and storing data in trees or graphs as an optimal data structure for the scenario we were going over. It stuck with me though. I've been putting a lot of thought into game state management and wanting to address it by using a generic layering/stacking approach. By that, I mean that I want to find a way to take base game state, allow mods or plugins to overlay their state, allow game patches to overlay their state, and then save game data to be overlaid on top of all of that. Conceptually, I believe…
Unity3D Default .NET Framework I recently wrote that I wanted to start writing more Unity3D articles because I'm starting to pick up more Unity3D hobby work. It felt like a good opportunity to share some of my learnings so that anyone searching across the web might stumble upon this and get answers to the same problems I had. Unity3D as of 2018.1.1f1 (which is the version I'm currently using), still defaults to using .NET 3.5 as the framework version. Nothing wrong with that either. I'm sure there are reasons that they have for staying at that version, probably because of Mono and cross platform reasons if I were to guess, so I'm not complaining. For reference, this setting in Unity3D is referred to as "Scripting Runtime Version". So if you're googling more about this later, that's what Unity calls it.…
Delta State Algorithm Motivation This post will act as the table of contents for an algorithm I'm developing for calculating deltas between state for generic sets of data. I figured this would be an interesting series to write about so I can document my thought process, trials, errors, and successes. At the end of this I plan to share working code that implements this algorithm so that you can use it in your own work. Now that I've been not diving more into Unity3D development for my hobby programming, I'm getting to a point in game development where I need to manage state for data in a way that allows patches of state to be applied in a layered fashion. A couple of examples of this include: Applying save game state to a base game state Applying a patch to…
Problem: Visual Studio and Unity Aren't Playing Nice! UPDATE: This is for older setups with Visual Studio and Unity. You may want to look at Assembly Definitions. I just started poking around in Unity 4.6 and I've been having a blast. I've made it to the point where I want to actually start hammering out some code, but I came across a bit of a problem: I want to start leveraging other projects I've written in my Unity solution while I'm in Visual Studio, and things are blowing up. So, what gives? Okay, so let me start by explaining why I want to do this. I understand that if I'm making a simple game, I should have no problem breaking out my unity scripts into sub folders and organizing them to be nice and pretty. The problem I'm encountering is that I…
Enforcing Interfaces This is my second installment of the series related to my small side project that I started. I mentioned in the first post that one of the things I wanted to try out with this project is coding by interfaces. There's an article over at CodeProject that I once read (I'm struggling to dig it up now, arrrrrghh) that really gave me a different perspective about using interfaces when I program. Ever since then I've been a changed man. Seriously. The main message behind the article was along the lines of: Have your classes implement your interface, and to be certain nobody is going to come by and muck around with your class's API, make sure they can't knowingly make an instance of the class. One of the easiest ways to do this (and bear with me here, I'm…
ProjectXyz Alright, I'll admit it... Even for a placeholder name on a side project it's pretty terrible, right? Well, my apologies. So, if you made it to this post you might be wondering what ProjectXyz is and why I started it up. From a high level, I started working on ProjectXyz so that I could have a hobby programming project to tinker with and I figured I'd blog about my adventures in bringing it all together. I plan on making this a mini-series documenting some of the things I'm learning or experimenting with, so this will serve as the intro to the series. Before we get too far, here's the link to the GitHub site: https://github.com/ncosentino/ProjectXyz Why Have a Side Project? Here's the main thing I want to talk about in part 1 of this series: Why should you have a…
