Happy new year
A happy new year to everyone! This has been quite a year for me, so what better opportunity to recap the birth process and evolution of Grid and set the plans for this year?
Grid Framework version 1.2.2 released
Update time. Let’s go over what’s new:
Unity and properties/accessors
As mentioned in the previous post I’d like to relate my experience with using properties in Unity and how to make them work properly. Properties are a C# feature and not available in UnityScript (another reason to ditch UnityScript). To help demonstrate what I mean I will be using a “circle” class.
Grid Framework version 1.2.3 released
This update brings you two new features, both were suggested by customers. The first one is the ability to set a separate set of colours for rendering instead of using the same colours as for drawing. Let’s say you want a barely visible grid in the game but a clearly visible grid in the editor. Until now you either had had to have two grids or use a script to change the colours once the game starts. Both options worked fine but required more work than needed, now you can do it out of the box. Of course it is entirely optional, so if you don’t set anything you will be using the same colours for rendering and drawing.
Seemingly endless grids and performance
I’ve been dealing with performance in Grid Framework recently and added a feature that will keep the Garbage Collector from going crazy. Until now rendering always went like this: Manager requests rendering from grid -> grid calculates the end points of each line -> these points get passed to Unity’s GL class for rendering. Every single frame. I have introduced a caching feature that will store all the calculated points and reuse them instead of calculating everything all over again as long as the grid has not been modified.
Grid Framework version 1.2.4 released
Version 1.2.4 has been approved by the Asset Store team. Here are the new features:
A first look at polar grids
I’ve been working on the next type of grid: polar grids. The polar grid is based on polar coordinates, meaning instead of identifying a point’s position using X and Y coordinates we use a radius and an angle. The radius tells us how far from the origin the point is and the angle tells us the direction. This screenshot shows the new polar grid in Unity
Grid Framework version 1.2.5 released
This release serves as a preparation for Version 1.3.0, which will add polar grids
Polar grid drawing refined
Hello again
Feature freeze for polar grids
Here is a quick update: I have reached feature freeze for polar grids, meaning I’m done with all the features. Now I need some last polish and I must prepare new images for the Asset Store, then it’s all good to go. So, what took me so long? Well, designing and writing code is one thing, then you have to put it to use This often reveals weak points, some things might seems counter-intuitive, or some things are more complicated to use than others.