Category: Programming

October 29, 2019

Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses

Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses

Unity Learn Course – Beginner Programming

Tips & Considerations

Unity’s Order of Events

Unity’s Order of Events:
Awake : OnEnable : Start : Update : OnDisable : OnDestroy

• Awake: first function called when object is instantiated; true whether added to scene in editor or instantiated in code
• OnEnable: event; fired when enabled gameObject is instantiated or when a disabled object is enabled
• Start: after Awake, and OnEnable, but before the 1st frame update
• Update: happens every frame after initialization methods
• FixedUpdate: frame-independent and occurs before physics calculations are performed
• LateUpdate: called once per frame after update method has completed execution
• OnDisable: event; fires when object is disabled, or before it is destroyed
• OnDestroy: execute when object is destroyed in code, or when scene containing it is unloaded

Reference Caching: creating a field for a reference and getting that reference once during initialization to use whenever that object is needed

This information is very useful to understand when you start referencing a lot of objects throughout your code and have a lot of pieces working together. This will help with avoiding errors, and debugging when those types of issues do come up. This is something I ran into a lot when working on my scene manager project as getting references was a bit of a pain and the timing was very crucial.

Using Attributes

Attributes (C#): powerful method of associating metadata, or declarative information, with code
Unity provides number of attributes to avoid mistakes and enhance functionality of inspector.

Some common attributes used in Unity include:

• SerializeField: makes a field accessible to the inspector
• Range
• Header
• Space
• RequireComponent

Public fields are inherently accessible by the inspector, but many other access modifiers hide the field from the inspector (like private). To get around this, you add the SerializeField attribute.

The RequireComponent attribute takes in a type and automatically adds that component type to the same gameObject whenever this object is placed. It also ensures that the other component cannot be removed while this component exists on the gameObject.

October 25, 2019

Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses

Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses

Unity Learn Course – Beginner Programming

Delegates, Events, and Actions

Delegates

Delegate: in C#, a type designed to hold a reference to a method in a delegate object

• Delgates are created using the “delegate” keyword.
• They are defined by their signature, meaning their return type.
• Finally they have parameters which they take in, similar to methods.

Using a delegate allowed us to parameterize a method. Using the delegate as a parameter for a method also allows us to use any method which matches that delegate’s signature to satisfy the parameter.

These are some snippets from two scripts, GameSceneController and EnemyController, that show some basics of utilizing delegates:

– In GameSceneController script
public delegate void TextOutputHandler(string text);

public void OutputText (string output)
{
Debug.LogFormat(“{0} output by GameSceneController”, output);
}

– In EnemyController script
void Update()
{
MoveEnemy(gameSceneController.OutputText);
}

private void MoveEnemy(TextOutputHandler outputHandler)
{
transform.Translate(Vector2.down * Time.deltaTime, Space.World);

float bottom = transform.position.y – halfHeight;

if(bottom <= -gameSceneController.screenBounds.y)
{
outputHandler(“Enemy at bottom”);
gameSceneController.KillObject(this);
}
}

For example, in our case we created a public void delegate with a string parameter called TextOutputHandler. Then another one of our methods, MoveEnemy, took a TextOutputHandler as a parameter, named outputHandler. Any method matching the signature of the delegate (in this case, public void with input parameter string) can satisfy the input parameter for the MoveEnemy method. As can be seen in the example, whatever method is passed in will be given the string “Enemy at bottom”.

A delegate used this way is commonly known as a “Callback”.

Events

C# Events: enable a class or object to notify other classes or objects when something of interest occurs.
Publisher: class that sends the event
Subscriber: class that receives/handles the event

Things like Unity’s UI elements use events inherently. For example, the Button script uses events to tell scripts when to activate when a button is clicked. This is different from a basic way of doing inputs which checks every frame if a button is being pressed (which is called “polling”). This is also why creating UI elements in Unity automatically creates an EventSystem object for you.

In C#, events are declared using the “event” keyword, and all events have an underlying delegate type.
C# events are multicast delegates.
Multicast delegate: delegate that can reference multiple methods

To help with my understanding, I tried testing the setup without having an EnemyController parameter to see why it was needed. I discovered it was necessary to pass along the reference so the small event system knew which object to destroy when calling the EnemyAtBottom method. Using Destroy(this.gameObject) or Destroy(gameObject) both just destroyed the SceneController as opposed to the individual enemies. This also helped me understand that adding a method to an event does not pass the method over as an equivalent, it simply means that when that event is called, that any methods assigned to it are also called in their current location in a class. So even though the event was being called in the EnemyController script, the method I added to it was still called within the GameSceneController script, which makes sense.

Example:

In EnemyController script

public delegate void EnemyEscapedHandler(EnemyController enemy);

public class EnemyController : Shape, IKillable
{
public event EnemyEscapedHandler EnemyEscaped;

void Update()
{
MoveEnemy();
}

private void MoveEnemy()
{
transform.Translate(Vector2.down * Time.deltaTime, Space.World);

float bottom = transform.position.y – halfHeight;

if(bottom <= -gameSceneController.screenBounds.y)
{
if(EnemyEscaped != null)
{
EnemyEscaped(this);
}
// Can be simplified to:
// EnemyEscaped?.Invoke(this);
}
}
}

In GameSceneController script:

public class GameSceneController : MonoBehaviour
{
private IEnumerator SpawnEnemies()
{
WaitForSeconds wait = new WaitForSeconds(2);

while (true)
{
float horizontalPosition = Random.Range(-screenBounds.x, screenBounds.x);
Vector2 spawnPosition = new Vector2(horizontalPosition, screenBounds.y);

EnemyController enemy = Instantiate(enemyPrefab, spawnPosition, Quaternion.identity);

enemy.EnemyEscaped += EnemyAtBottom;

yield return wait;
}
}

private void EnemyAtBottom(EnemyController enemy)
{
Destroy(enemy.gameObject);
Debug.Log(“Enemy escaped”);
}
}

I’ve simplified the scripts down to just the parts dealing with the events to make it easier to follow. As I understand it, we create the delegate: public delegate void EnemyEscapedHandler(EnemyController enemy) in the EnemyController script (but outside of the EnemyController class). Within the EnemyController class, we create an event of the type EnemyEscapedHandler, so this event can take on methods with the same signature as EnemyEscapedHandler. Within the MoveEnemy method, we invoke the EnemyEscaped event and satisfy its parameters by passing in this, which is the unique instance of the EnemyController script (after checking that there is a method assigned to this event).

Then in the GameSceneController script, we see that when we instantiate an enemy, we keep a reference to its EnemyController script. This is to assign the EnemyAtBottom method to each one’s EnemyEscaped event. Now anytime EnemyEscaped is called in the EnemyController script, it will then call the EnemyAtBottom script here, passing whatever parameter it (EnemyEscaped) has to the parameter for EnemyAtBottom. In this case, passing this in EnemyEscaped ensures that EnemyAtBottom knows which enemy to destroy.

Actions

Actions (C#): types in the System namespace that allow you to encapsulate methods without explicitly defining a delegate
In fact, they are delegates
Actions can be generic

An Action is just an event delegate that does not need another delegate to be created first to be used as a reference. The Action itself determines what parameters are necessary for the passed methods.

October 22, 2019

Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses

Beginner Programming: Unity Game Dev Courses

Unity Learn Course – Beginner Programming

Working with Classes

The Four Pillars of OOP

• 1. Encapsulation: grouping of data and methods into a cohesive object
• 2. Abstraction: process of exposing only those features of an object necessary for interactions
• 3. Inheritance: creating a new class based on and extending another
• 4. Polymorphism: ability of an object of function to take on a different form

The PlayerController class created for this section of the tutorials dervied from the Shape class, which allowed it to inherit the SetColor method and change the player to yellow. It also extended the class by creating its own method, MovePlayer. I am trying to keep track of this to ensure I keep all the terminology straight.

There was an interesting approach to using WaitForSeconds in the enemy spawning method. Instead of directly using new WaitForSeconds directly in the yield return statement of the coroutine, they actually created a WaitForSeconds variable reference named wait. They then just used wait in the yield return statement in place of all the WaitForSeconds syntax. This is nice to keep in mind as another way to organize coroutines, especially those that use similar values for multiple yield statements.

Inheritance and Polymorphism

Inheritance was demonstrated by creating protected variables within the base class that could be used by all of the derived classes. The examples here were halfHeight and halfWidth, which assumed the values of the bounds.extents of the SpriteRenderer at Start. This was done in the Start method of the base class, so the derived classes simply had to call base.Start() to have those values individually set for all of them inheriting from Shape class.

It is important to note for this to work they made the Start method in the base class a virtual protected method. This allowed the derived classes to override the Start method to add functionality, while also using the base.Start() method still to assume the base class’s Start method functionality. This started to get into polymorphism.

virtual: this keyword can be used to modify a method, property, indexer, or event declaration and allow for it to be overridden in a derived class

IMPORTANT: This can be used in conjunction with the protected access modifier to allow for a base class’s Start method to be useable within the Start method of derived classes. By creating a protected virtual void Start method in the base class, the derived classes can have their own modified Start methods by using a protected override void Start method and calling the base.Start() method from within.