Topic

code

A collection of 10 issues

Allow unfree in a shell.nix

I recently made a switch to NixOS on my primary laptop, and have been exploring the use of nix-shell to build and run declarative, ephemeral environments. Each environment comes with different packages installed. For those unfamiliar with NixOS, it's a Linux distribution that takes a unique approach to package and

Clever preprocessor macro in HLSL

I've been working on implementing various data structures (octrees, queues, and sorting algorithms) in HLSL to execute in parallel on a GPU. I quickly discovered that I was doing a lot of copy and paste because HLSL doesn't support fancy features like function pointers and lambdas. Most recently I implemented

Yes, you CAN serialize abstract classes in Unity

Over and over I've seen posts around the web and on the various Q&A sites like this: > I have an abstract class and two (or more) classes that implement this abstract class (not MonoBehaviours). All classes are marked Serializable, and I use them in a MonoBehaviour. But for some

A single method that can work with either a List or an Array (IEnumerable and ICollection)

A while back I wrote a method that takes an array of data that I use for inserting records into a database: public Promise InsertOrReplaceAsync(string table, Dictionary[] records) { //... } An annoying issue is in some parts of my code the records are a List instead of an array, so I

Round a number to some multiple of another number

Recently I needed to round a rotation value to increments of 45 degrees. Every once in a while I run into needing to do this and I always forget the trick to it, but it's rather simple: To round a number x to a multiple of another number n: float

Testing C# code in the browser

Have you ever wanted to just test a short bit of C# code that you could quickly run through and tweak before integrating it into a larger project? I recently came across an online C# compiler that helps with just that: https://dotnetfiddle.net

Element-wise Vector Multiplication in Unity (Vector3.Scale)

I often need to multiply two vectors together one element at a time. This is called the Hadamard Product [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadamard_product_(matrices)]. Typically I do it this way: Vector3 a=new Vector3(1,2,3); Vector3 b=new Vector3(4,5,6); Vector3 result = new

The top 5 things I've learned as an Indie Unity Developer

I have released one game implemented with the Unity engine and have two more in the pipeline. Over time I've learned quite a bit, often by doing things the wrong way first. 1. Embrace component-based design and avoid Inheritance When I first started working with Unity I was coming from

Serializing Interfaces in Unity

The Unity Inspector is a great tool for combing and configuring various components into powerful game objects with complex behaviors, all with little to no additional coding. Interfaces [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/interfaces/index] are a useful architecture mechanism enabling developers to design good contracts between

Unity Events

Events are a powerful feature allowing a method to be notified when the event fires. C# has an event system built into the language itself. Unity provides its own event mechanism called UnityEvents [https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityEvents.html] that, unlike C# events, is accessible from the Unity Editor.