Content that is all about programming and coding! Find examples of code often written in C# along with tutorials.
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…
Looking to get started using dependency injection with Autofac in your projects? Here's a quick primer on what it is and how to get going for your next project.
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…
A Quick Brain-Dump on API Desgin I'll keep this one pretty brief as I haven't totally nailed down my thoughts on this. I still thought it was worth a quick little post: When you're creating a brand new API to expose some functionality of a system, should you design it with a strong focus on how the internals work? Should you ignore how internals work and make it as easy to consume as possible? Or is there an obvious balance? I find myself trying to answer this question without ever explicitly asking it. Any time I'm looking to extend or connect systems, this is likely to come up. Most Recently... Most recently I started trying to look at creating an API over AMQP to connect my game back-end to a Unity 3D front-end. I had been developing the back-end for…
Whose Job Is It? I wanted to share my experience that I had working on a recent project. If you've been programming for a while, you've definitely heard of the single responsibility principle. If you're new to programming, maybe this is news. The principle states: That every class should have responsibility over a single part of the functionality provided by the software, and that responsibility should be entirely encapsulated by the class You could extend this concept to apply to not only classes, but methods as well. Should you have that one method that is entirely responsible for creating a database connection, connecting to a web service, downloading data, updating the database, uploading some data, and then doing some user interface rendering? What would you even call that?! The idea is really this: break down your code into separate pieces of functionality.…
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…
Refactoring: Some Background If you're a seasoned programmer you know all about refactoring. If you're relatively new to programming, you probably have heard of refactoring but don't have that much experience actually doing it. After all, it's easier to just rewrite things from scratch instead of trying to make a huge design change part way through, right? In any mature software project, it's often the case where you'll get to a point where your code base in its current state cannot properly sustain large changes going forward. It's not really anyone's fault--it's totally natural. It's impossible to plan absolutely everything that comes up, so it's probable that at some point at least part of your software project will face refactoring. In my real life example, I was tasked with refactoring a software project that has a single owner. I'm close…
