Posts Tagged plugin

C++ Scripting: Part 6 – Building the C++ Plugin

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Today we’ll continue the series by addressing a nagging problem: how do we build the C++ plugin? With C# we inherit, for better or worse, Unity’s build system where we just edit .cs files and press the play button. This doesn’t work with C++, so we’ll need to build something similar that’s just as easy to use.

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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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C++ Scripting: Part 1 – C#/C++ Communication

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For all of the nice things about C#, writing code with it also comes with a lot of downsides. We spend so much time working around the garbage collector, working around IL2CPP, and worrying about what’ll happen if we use a foreach loop. Today’s article starts a series that explores what would happen if we escaped .NET and wrote our code as a C++ plugin instead of using C#.

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Simple Plugin System

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Sizable applications are often in need of externalizing code from the main application. Often times this is done via a library or framework and it is well understood in the Flash community how to use these in our applications. What is less-understood is how we can go about delegating some parts of our applications to plugins. Read on for a simple technique to get plugins into your Flash application.

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