When I released version 1 and version 2 of Grid Framework there was no real way of separating libraries. You had to dump everything into your project in one assembly. Using namespaces prevented name collisions, but you still had things like examples or documentation bloating up your project and there was no way of expressing dependencies. Since then Unity has introduced its own package system, which will solve many of the problems I have had in the past.
I have completely transitioned Grid Framework to a Unity3D package now and moved Vectrosity support to a separate package. The Vectrosity package will be made available as a public Git repository under the MIT license, that should make it as simple as possible for users to add it to their project. While transitioning to packages has had many advantages there have also been some challenges to overcome and I would like to go over them in this post.
In my previous post I wrote about how I maintain the optional extra packages to Grid Framework. Since this point is useful for working with Unity in general I think it’s worth elaborating upon the topic in a separate post.
Let’s have a mental exercise: image something shameful you have done, it doesn’t have to be the most shameful thing, just something that you really are not proud of should do. Now imagine putting it in a sealed box where it will be rotting and festering for years. Now imagine having to open that box, slowly lifting the lid as the rancid smell starts creeping out of the box. That is how it felt when I opened up the old Playmaker support.
The new overhauled Playmaker bindinds will be shipped as a separate package, so this lets me finally implement a great jumping-off point for new users: included samples. The following samples are now included and can be individually added to or removed from your project: