Posts Tagged P/Invoke

C++ Scripting: Part 15 – Delegates

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This week’s article adds another major feature to the C++ scripting system: delegates. These are vital so C++ game code can use features like Unity’s UI system (a.k.a. UGUI). Without them, we wouldn’t be able to handle button clicks or other UI events. So read on to learn how these were implemented in the GitHub project.

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C++ Scripting: Part 14 – Arrays

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The series continues by adding support for a major feature: arrays. These are used very frequently throughout the Unity and .NET APIs and the lack of support for them has been a big missing piece of the puzzle for most games. The GitHub project has been updated to support single- and multi-dimensional arrays. Read on to learn how this support was implemented!

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C++ Scripting: Part 13 – Operator Overloading, Indexers, and Type Conversion

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Today’s article continues the series by adding support for C++ to call the various overloaded operators and indexers that are written in C#. This includes support for all 24 overloadable operators in C# plus the explicit and implicit type conversion operators. Indexers aren’t quite overloaded operators, but they allow for array-like indexing into C# types so they’re included today. Read on to learn how all this support was implemented in the GitHub project!

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C++ Scripting: Part 12 – Exceptions

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Like them or not, exceptions are the standard way of handling programming errors in C#. We need to be able to catch C# exceptions in our C++ code so we can gracefully recover from them. Likewise, we need uncaught C++ exceptions to behave like unhandled C# exceptions: display an error and move on instead of crashing. Today’s article continues the series by implementing both those features in the GitHub project and explaining how that implementation was done.

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C++ Scripting: Part 11 – Collaborators, Structs, and Enums

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The series to build a viable system to write Unity scripts in C++ continues! While these 11 articles have covered a lot of ground toward making a usable C++ scripting system, there’s still a lot to do. Writing the code for these articles takes quite a lot of time, so today I’m officially calling for collaborators on the GitHub project. If you’d like to join in, please leave a comment, send an e-mail, or submit a pull request. There’s plenty to do and your help would be greatly appreciated! Aside from that, today’s article is all about adding support for struct and enum types so we can use types like Vector3 and TextureFormat from our C++ scripts.

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C++ Scripting: Part 7 – MonoBehaviour Messages

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The series continues this week by addressing a pretty important issue. Previously, we were limited to doing all our work in just two C++ functions: PluginMain and PluginUpdate. This isn’t at all the normal way to work in Unity. It’d be a lot more natural to write our code in MonoBehaviour classes. So today we’ll come up with some tricks to allow us to write our MonoBehaviour code in C++ so we are truly scripting in C++.

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C++ Scripting: Part 5 – Bindings Code Generator

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Last week in the series we took a step back to verify that the C++ plugin’s performance was acceptable. With that confirmed, we’ll continue this week by making our programming lives easier. One pain point so far has been with exposing new Unity APIs to C++. It’s not that it’s difficult to do this, but there’s a lot of boilerplate required. That boilerplate takes time to write and it’s easy to make mistakes copying and pasting existing functions. So this week’s article introduces a code generator that will write the boilerplate for us! We’ll also reorganize the project a little so the code that supports C++ scripting is separated away from our game code. That’ll make it easy to add support for C++ scripting to any Unity project.

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C++ Scripting: Part 4 – Performance Validation

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In the first three parts of this series, we focused on setting up a development environment that makes it easy and safe to write our game code in C++. Today’s article takes a step back to assess where we are in terms of performance. Is what we’ve built so far viable, or are the calls between C# and C++ too expensive? To find out we’ll use the existing framework to write some simple performance tests.

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C++ Scripting: Part 3 – Object-Oriented Bindings

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Last week’s article continued the series by eliminating the need to reboot the editor for every change to the C++ plugin. The idea is to make a more productive environment for us, the programmers, to work in. This week we’ll continue that theme by mimicking the object-oriented Unity API in C++. So instead of int transformHandle = GameObjectGetTransform(goHandle) we’ll write a more familiar Transform transform = go.GetTransform(). Also, we’ll build a simple system to automatically clean up object handles so we don’t have to do that manually.

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C++ Scripting: Part 2 – Update C++ Without Restarting the Editor

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Last week we began the series by establishing two-way communication between C# and C++. We used object handles to pass class instances between the two languages. Everything was going great, but then there was a major productivity problem: we had to restart the Unity editor every time we changed the C++ plugin. Today’s article is all about how to overcome that obstacle so you can iterate on your code just like with C#.

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