Everyday Unity

ECS Galaxy Sample: a project showing a large-scale simulation of several teams of spaceships fighting for the control of planets. This is a fully-automated simulation, but players can spectate using different camera modes. Players can also bring up a "Settings" menu during play to tweak some simulation parameters in realtime. This sample aims to strike a balance between being simple and lightweight enough to be easy to learn from, and involving enough non-trivial ECS game code (AI, spatial queries, event-based logic, different unit/building types and roles, etc...) to make an interesting showcase. https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ECSGalaxySample/tree/main #ecs #dots

Instantly Boost Unity Game Performance With IL2CPP_USE_SPARSEHASH Finally, another post on my blog. This investigation was time-consuming, and while I won't say I enjoy digging through generated C++ code, the results were worth the effort. Hit the fire emoji if you like this type of content and want me to write more of it. The metadata in IL2CPP generated for each type and used for tasks like virtual method invocation is barely covered online. Not even the Unity documentation provides sufficient information. More crucially, you won't find details online about how the metadata is stored in memory or the existence of the define IL2CPP_USE_SPARSEHASH. In this post, I dive into the internals available in the generated C++ code to learn more about it and how we can significantly boost the performance of some operations in our games using this knowledge. Here is a lifehack to improve performance using a concrete example of dependency resolution at app start for all DI enjoyers. Of course, this isn't free, but performance is always about compromise. https://gamedev.center/instantly-boost-unity-game-performance-with-il2cpp_use_sparsehash/ I've also posted this on Reddit, so I would appreciate it if you upvote it for all the effort put into this: a reddit post #il2cpp #performance #optimization #IL2CPP_USE_SPARSEHASH

[C#] Asynchronous processing and async/await A great overview of how async/await works, from the differences between async and multithreading programming to explaining how async is compiled and operates under the hood. It's an excellent resource for interview preparation. The content is in Japanese, but it's by the already legendary Annulus Games, and auto-translation does a good job. https://annulusgames.com/blog/async-await/ #async #interview

An unusual post for this channel and a note on why I haven't posted in a while. I had the pleasure of giving a talk at Digital Dragons about "The Controllers Tree," the architectural framework developed by some of the top-tier engineers at our company. I didn't expect the venue to be completely packed. I was pleasantly surprised to see so many people interested in the architecture at the event. And of course, thanks to all the engineers who participated in developing the framework. It helps us to build and grow multiple of the biggest mobile games. We hope to release the Controllers Tree package as an open-source solution soon, so stay tuned. I also hope the video of the talk will be posted by the organizers on YouTube soon, so I can share it here. Drop a comment if you happened to attend this conference too.

Unity UI Toolkit documentation code examples We are actively adopting UI Toolkit for our editor tools. And it turns out to be pretty convenient. Still a lot of concerns regarding using it in the runtime tho. Do you have any experience with it for in-game UI? How is it going? Would you recommend it? Would be happy to discuss in the comments. Editor UI examples Get started with UI Toolkit Relative and absolute positioning C# example Create a Custom Inspector Runtime UI examples Get started with runtime UI And many more other examples how to do different stuff with it. Check the full list in the repo. https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ui-toolkit-manual-code-examples #uitoolkit #sample

Master Realtime VFX in Unity and Substance Designer! Learn How to Create a Fire AOE Orb! I used this tutorial to create a fire orb for my game. It's 1 hour long, but covers everything in detail. If you are new to the shader graph, then I definitely recommend it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb3Zv9H1os4 #vfx #shadergraph

When, where, and why to put [BurstCompile], with mild under-the-hood explanation A while ago, I was reviewing the burst inspector and noticed that only static methods were being bursted while others that I thought should qualify were not (no reference types, structs passed as ref args, etc.). After I had made these methods static, they were bursted right away. I was wondering why this was the case because I haven't seen that requirement in the docs (I probably just missed it). Anyway, I have recently found this thread which directly answers this question.

The first two things to know, from which all else flows, but seems a bit surprising at first: 1. Burst can only ever burst static methods, period, end of story. If you want this to happen outside of the special cases outlined below, just put [BurstCompile] on a static method and on its declaring type.* When you call this method, it will call the bursted version automatically, assuming burst compilation didn't fail. 2. Unless you try really hard, all C# called from bursted code is bursted.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/when-where-and-why-to-put-burstcompile-with-mild-under-the-hood-explanation.1344539/ #dots #ecs

The Strange Graphics Of LETHAL COMPANY The case when it's so strange that it turns out to be genius. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_-am00EXIc #rendering

Enableable Components Generated Code How do enableable components work under the hood with the job system? There is actually the same code generated for both regular and enableable components, and multiple ifs decide how the components are processed. https://gametorrahod.com/enableable-generated-code/ #ecs #dots

mixandjam/balatro-feel: Recreating the basic Game Feel from Balatro I've played Balatro a lot, and one of the reasons it's so satisfying is its animations and card behavior. Despite being pretty simple, the attention to detail is crazy. Once, I even caught myself staring at the card iteration animation, which is a plain white texture fade-out, but it blends so nicely with the overall flow. https://github.com/mixandjam/balatro-feel #feature #feel #balatro

Adds various noise generation nodes to Unity Shader Graph, including 3D noise nodes. https://github.com/JimmyCushnie/Noisy-Nodes #shadergraph #noise

How To Fix Deep Link/Push Notifications Crashes On Unity iOS after Apple Privacy Manifests update (and Why Software Design Matters) A nasty crash appeared after the update from Unity 2021.3.31f1 to 2021.3.36f1, and the update was required due to the Apple privacy update and the introduction of Privacy manifest files since the support for it was added relatively recently. So you either have already encountered this crash or would encounter it soon if you publish your games to the App Store as the deadline for this update is really close. Strangely it was reproduced only on iOS 15 and 16, while iOS 17 was okay. It turned out to be an interesting investigation, so I wanted to share the details with you. It's funny how the regex to replace the generated UnityAppController.mm in FB SDK has been sitting there since 2015 and only now fired so badly causing crash on a subset of devices. And it happened due to the UnityAppController.mm template being updated in one of the newer Unity versions. And it's a perfect example of "Unknown Unknowns" discussed in "A Philosophy of Software Design" by John Ousterhout. Unknown unknowns increase the complexity of your system, but when it happens between 2 third parties it becomes multitude times harder to track and resolve. I definitely recommend the book. According to the issue tracker it also happens in 2022 and 2023, so now you know what to do if your app starts crashing on iOS after Unity update. https://gamedev.center/how-to-fix-deep-link-push-notifications-crashes-on-unity-ios-and-why-software-design-matters/ #crash #ios

How to implement multi-threaded frustum culling in Unity C# Unity does this process under the hood already, but for some special cases with a custom renderer it might be needed. https://www.pinwheelstud.io/post/frustum-culling-in-unity-csharp #jobsystem #culling

UnityDomainReloadHelper A couple of attributes that help when Domain Reloading is disabled significantly decrease the time it takes for Unity to play a scene. By default, Unity provides the RuntimeInitializeOnLoadMethod attribute to assist, but it can be a little cumbersome. I encourage you to write code in a way that allows you to turn off the domain reload upon entering play mode. It greatly speeds up the workflow even for my small pet projects. I have also worked on projects in production that have more than 1k assembly definitions, and reloading takes ages, so entering play mode was painfully slow and without this option turned off it was really hard to work. https://github.com/joshcamas/unity-domain-reload-helper #domainreload #attribute #editortools

Modern Git Commands and Features You Should Be Using Switch, restore, sparse checkout, worktree, bisect https://martinheinz.dev/blog/109 #git

LWGUI: A Lightweight, Flexible, Powerful Shader GUI System for Unity. https://github.com/JasonMa0012/LWGUI #inspector #shader

AnnulusGames/Alchemy: Provides a rich set of editor extensions and serialization extensions for Unity Another great package by Annulus Games - open source Odin alternative. https://github.com/AnnulusGames/Alchemy #inspector

AnnulusGames/UGUIAnimationSamples: A sample project that includes implementation examples of UI animation for Unity UI (uGUI) using LitMotion and UniTask. The repo with samples how to use LitMotion tweener, but can be used as an inspo and easily ported to any other tweener. https://github.com/AnnulusGames/UGUIAnimationSamples #tween #sample

Grass System Extension: Cutting https://www.patreon.com/posts/grass-system-100668614 #shader #grass #cut