Posts
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Sep 25, 2016
Separation of concerns with Unity UI
I have worked with various interpretations of MVC-like patterns over the years and have experimented a lot with applying them to UIs in Unity. The patterns that I found to work best with nGUI and uGUI are MVP (Model-View-Presenter) (passive view) and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).
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Sep 4, 2016
Managing and reporting player achievements
When implementing goals such as achievements I like to keep the detection logic separate from the main game logic wherever possible. Otherwise it is easy to end up with spaghetti where achievements are being reported all over the place. One way to separate this cross cutting concern is to have each goal monitor the game’s state to detect success or even failure.
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Jul 17, 2016
Dependency injection in Unity with Zenject
Dependency injection in Unity projects is slightly complicated by the fact that we do not have full control over the initialization of the engine. Unity instantiates it’s various object types (
GameObject,Component,MonoBehaviour,ScriptableObject,Material, etc) when scenes and assets are loaded. Put simply… the objects exist before we can do anything with them. -
Aug 28, 2015
Custom editor controls in Unity - Part 5: Custom styles
Sometimes it becomes necessary to define custom
GUIStyle’s to get the most desirable user experience from your editor controls. Custom styles can be defined using a number of different approaches. You can createGUISkinasset files; custom asset files or simply write some code that creates theGUIStyle’s programmatically. The latter is nice when you want the styles to be embedded into a DLL. -
Aug 27, 2015
Custom editor controls in Unity - Part 4: Property drawers
Often it is nice to customize the way that some properties are presented in the inspector but you don’t necessarily want to define an entire custom inspector. Fortunately Unity has a feature that enables you to customize the drawing of properties without having to define how the entire inspector of a component should work.
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Aug 26, 2015
Custom editor controls in Unity - Part 3: Input control
More often than not editor controls will have some sort of value that is shown and editable visually. In this post I am going to walk you through the creation of a custom control that allows some flags to be toggled using a simple grid.
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Aug 25, 2015
Custom editor controls in Unity - Part 2: Buttons
I think that a great place to start with custom control development is to re-create the
GUI.ButtonandGUILayout.Buttoncontrols since these are straightforward to create and helps to establish some of the fundamentals of custom control development. Our custom button implementation will be used in the exact same way as the regular button controls: -
Aug 24, 2015
Custom editor controls in Unity - Part 1: Events
I frequently develop custom controls for custom editor windows, inspectors, property drawers, etc when working on Unity projects to ease project workflows. People often ask how I create these controls so I thought that I would dedicate a blog post towards it for anyone that might be interested.
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Jul 9, 2015
Ordered dictionary for Unity
When working on projects it is often useful to have some sort of asset that maps values to keys. Since Unity doesn’t currently support the serialization of dictionaries this is something that I either try to avoid needing entirely or that I end up having to reinvent each time by implementing the ISerializationCallbackReceiver interface following the example in Unity’s documentation.
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Apr 21, 2015
Maintaining asset releases for multiple versions of Unity
When Unity 4 was released I was able to continue to provide support for Unity 3 by tweaking logic so that it would satisfy both of the releases of Unity and in a couple of circumstances to use reflection to transparently select between Unity 3 and Unity 4 APIs. This mainly affected editor logic and so it was possible to get JIT compiled delegates to make the reflected invocations more efficient.