“Snake” & SharpFS

I decided to program a Snake game today to kill some time. Since everyone (hopefully!) knows what Snake is I’m not going into details about what the game is or how it works.

There’s nothing special about it, just your bog-basic Snake game. If you want to have a look at it here’s the public bitbucket repository: https://bitbucket.org/7BiTpsycho/snake

The game uses Unity3D as game engine. I decided not to upload a build since I did not want to waste space on my Dropbox account. Just download Unity3D 5.3.1 as you are good to go :) The source code is simple and understandable and uses XML comments where ever possible.

So, now to the important stuff: How’s SharpFS doing?

Version Control

A quick side note to myself as a developer: I am horrible when it comes to version control. I know how it works, I know why you’d use it, I just never use it. Why? I’ve never been forced to use it(meaning: Never did a collab with more than 3 three people) and never been punished for not using it(meaning: PC died and thousands of lines of code lost which weren’t backup-ed).

Well, today I had the awesome idea that it would be a brilliant idea to be able to access all my code regardless of where I am. Meaning: Saving all my code in a cloud. I already started fiddling around with some dropbox stuff (Don’t get me wrong, dropbox is a great service! (Though I have to admit that it’s hard to say that a cloud is awful when getting gifted ~20 GB online file storage for buying various devices of manufacturers affiliated with dropbox.)), when I realized “Hey! Isn’t that exactly what Version Control is used for?”.

A (quick) update on things

Since it feels like ages since I’ve last made a blog post, here we go: First of all SharpFS(Yep, that’s the new name for UnityFS) is ready to be resubmitted to the asset store moderators. I will probably redo the tutorial video and submit the asset itself tomorrow. And then the waiting part begins again. Yay!

The following methods were added to SharpFS:

// Lists all directories in a directory of this file system which pass a certain filter.
IEnumerable<string> GetDirectories(string directory = "", string filters = null)
// Removes all search paths currently used by this file system.
void RemoveAllSearchPaths()
// Removes the write path from this file system.
void RemoveWritePath()

So, what else did I do in the meantime since I can’t possibly have wasted all this time just adding three simple methods to a library which is already fully operational anyways?

UnityFS declined

Unfortunately UnifyFS has been declined by the Asset Store moderators due to having the term “Unity” in its name. Apparently this is not allowed since it would lead users into thinking that Unity Technologies was involved during the creation of the Asset.

While I completely understand their reason I could name numerous assets on the Asset Store which do have “Unity” in their name, some of them are even quite successful. But whatever, I can’t change it, and I’ll have to deal with it.

What does this mean for you? Well, it mainly means that you’ll have to wait even longer until the release. I will have to come up with a new name for the Asset, rerecord the tutorial videos and rewrite all demos since they all used the name “UnityFS”.

UnityFS submitted for review!

I just submitted UnityFS for review on the Unity Asset Store. I have no idea of how long it will take to get accepted. The final price of UnityFS is 5 USD. However, the actual price may be a bit higher/lower depending on how the Asset Store handles your regional currency.

“Let’s just fix this one last bug”

… these were my words at around midnight today. Now its almost 5AM in the morning here at my place. Oh well.

On the bright side I would consider UnityFS as completed. I still need to do some performance tests and hope to get accepted for the beta-program of https://readthedocs.com/. If that won’t happen in time I will probably resort to making one or two tutorial videos for the people on the Unity Asset Store. I don’t want to announce a fixed release date, but it should hopefully be submitted for review until the end of next weekend. How long it will take to appear on the Asset Store depends on the moderators.

UnityFS development near completion

In the last few days I have been trying to write a .NET binding for the C library PhysicsFS(https://icculus.org/physfs/) ready for usage in Unity3d. Whilst there was no direct problem writing wrappers for the methods and adjusting some stuff for improved compatibility, the issue was debugging it.

As you are probably aware debugging in Unity itself is already a huge pain. Now imagine trying to figure out if the bug you encountered origins from a modified C library which is being used by a managed .NET C# library using tons of unsafe code which is being referenced by some scripts in Unity. In case there is a way to deal with this effectively it is far beyond my knowledge.

So I ended up writing my own implementation purely in managed C#. Much easier to debug and maintain. Also gives me a better understanding about what is going on behind the scenes, since well … its my own code. I figured that calling it UnityFS sounds like a good idea.