Devlog - January 29th 2023

Mod support for scene loading & UI Toolkit course

This week’s focus was on improving the game initialization pipeline with mod support. For that I extended the mod system to better integrate with scene loading. A scene in Unity is essentially a container for game objects. Game objects are the base for most things you create in the Unity engine. By extending the mod system to easily allow scene loading within mods it allows for modders to simply set up scenes in their mods and have them loaded at the appropriate times during the game initialization setup or at other times. Scenes can for example be used to initialize important data or systems within the mod. The same is true for how my game is initialized. Scenes essentially allow me to better organize different systems. After the scene loading worked I was considering what the best way to go forward would be with the new multi project setup I talked about last week. Originally I wanted to immediately dive in and start creating the main menu with the new UI system called UI Toolkit. Instead of doing that I decided to get a small course for it on Udemy to make sure I know about all the base features it provides. While I have worked with it for a day or so for the world generation tech demo UI I was not very familiar with all the aspects of it and since it’s a fairly new system in Unity it made sense for me to take a course on it. I’m very glad I did because I learned quite a few things I previously didn’t know about and the 2 days I spent on the course were really worth it. After the course and all the new information on UI Toolkit I spent the last day this week checking all the assets I use and if they would work in the latest Unity 2022 version. I did this because in a few months time the 2022 LTS (long term support) version will be released which I want to update to as soon as possible. The UI Toolkit version is much more mature in that Unity version than it is in 2021 LTS so getting to update to 2022 as soon as possible would allow me to make the most of UI Toolkit when creating the new UI’s for the game. Generally I only want to update to long term support versions as they only contain bug fixes and won’t introduce any feature changes but the lack of features of UI Toolkit in 2021 force me to use 2022 if I don’t want to make major changes to my UI at some point. Since all but one asset work in Unity 2022 I will be updating the project next week already. The one asset that currently does not work is the terrain shader but I’ve seen in the asset creators discord channel that a new package for 2022 has already been submitted to the asset store and should be available within a few weeks time. Since it’s not an essential asset for the game flow I will simply go with the other assets first and update the terrain shader once the 2022 version for it is available. Going with Unity 2022 right away for all the new projects and assets will also save me at least a few days in the future because I don’t have to do any version updates by going with the next version already. That’s all I had time for this week. I’m feeling pretty good about getting UI related work done next week with the new knowledge I acquired and to create a good code foundation for its interaction as well.

Notable tasks this week:

• Extended the scene loading system with mod support
• Took a Udemy course on UI Toolkit
• Tested all third party assets’ compatibility with latest Unity 2022 version

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That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.