Happy new year everyone!  Time for a quick dev update for last week (meant to post this earlier, but ah well).

Networking abstraction and Photon PUN

About a year ago I implemented a networking abstraction layer to separate use of the deprecated Unity RakNet based API from the rest of the code.

Last week I made some improvements to its interface to finish it off, and then I added a new implementation under the hood using Photon PUN 2.  I went with PUN because it’s easy to get up and running, it’s well supported, and its API is very similar to the old Unity API.  Thankfully the PUN implementation was relatively easy to do, partly due to the API similarity, and partly because of the abstraction layer which meant I didn’t have to touch the rest of the code.

I’ve no idea yet if I’ll stick with PUN in the long run, but for now it at least means I can get rid of all references to the deprecated Unity networking API, while not breaking my prototype multiplayer implementation.  So now I’m finally free to move on past Unity 2017.4 and upgrade to a newer version, which I’ll hopefully be doing soon!

Builder tool UI feedback

After the recent video I put out about the builder tool UI changes I was considering, I’ve had loads of amazing and really useful feedback, so thank you for that!  I think the consensus is to leave things as they are and focus on the rest of the game, so that’s what I’ll be doing, at least for now.  I’ll keep the prototype code around somewhere in case I need to come back to it in the future.

Saved game serialization

As for this week, I’m back to looking at Json.NET saved game serialization, a topic I covered a few months ago.  I’m trying to improve on the performance and GC alloc issues I had discussed in that blog post.  If this doesn’t work out then Json isn’t going to be viable for this purpose, and I’ll have to think of another way to solve the inflexibility of the current binary stream based system.