20 Advanced Coding Tips For Big Unity Projects
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- Опубліковано 13 тра 2024
- End spaghetti code! Learn the tools you need to write scalable, well-structured, clean code. So many game developers are forced to scrap their ambitious Unity games because they don't know these tips. As a young, self taught game developer, I didn’t discover these tools and techniques for years. Hopefully this video will help you to skip the learning curve and expose you to some of the more advanced programming devices that don’t get enough attention from the plethora of beginner Unity tutorials.
//chapters
00:00 - Intro
01:12 - Variable Names
02:11 - Comments
02:58 - Encapsulate in Functions
03:36 - Plan Your Code
03:57 - C# Properties
04:38 - Serialize Field
05:02 - Component Architecture
06:00 - Enums
06:25 - Coroutines
07:32 - Invoke/Invoke Repeating
08:03 - Structs
08:50 - Singletons
10:38 - C# Events
12:34 - Unity Events
12:56 - Interfaces
14:34 - Inheritance
17:50 - Scriptable Objects
19:15 - Custom Editor Tools
20:25 - Use Version Control
21:00 - Refactor Often
21:38 - Outro
//socials
Instagram: tesseract.yt
TikTok: tesseractyt
//long description
So you finally decided to begin work on your “dream game”, a fantasy MMO RPG sandbox battle royale powered by a blockchain economy. What could possibly go wrong? Then, two months later, progress comes to a grinding halt. You have scripts that are a thousand lines long, you’ve forgotten what your old code does, adding new features means you have to rewrite three old ones, every script relies on every other one, and overall, your project becomes an unorganized, unmanageable, confusing, dumpster fire of spaghetti code. Tragically, you are forced to scrap the project and give up on your game dev dreams. Sound familiar?
There are hundreds of hours of Unity tutorials online, but very few are geared towards more advanced developers aiming to create large scale commercial games. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of some of the most valuable unity coding tips that I’ve learned over the years, along with examples of how I’ve actually used these techniques in my own game. Hopefully, by the end of the video, you’ll have the tools you need to write scalable, well structured, clean code that won’t come back to bite you down the road.
//music
Evan King - Nightmares and Violent Shapes
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contextsensitive.bandcamp.com/
Internet Historian: Sthlm Sunset - Ehrling, A.X - Ehrling, Night Out - LiQWYD
• Internet Historian Mus...
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
uppbeat.io/t/mountaineer/fly-...
License code: VVIYH4NIZH0ARSHF
uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/joyful...
License code: AMYFJECHAZAJGCMI
uppbeat.io/t/swoop/lucidity
License code: Z6V3SJ5TMSRFUKKU
uppbeat.io/t/movediz/summer-v...
License code: F9CFDRM8JFBQIVOD
//hashtags
#unity #unity3d #unitytutorial #gamedevelopment #coding #programming #indiegame #cleancode #codingtips - Ігри
Here's a couple of notes/corrections that people have pointed out in the comments:
🔵 The tip I called "getters and setters" should've been referred to as C# properties
🔵 Use Invoke(nameof(yourFunction)) instead of using a string parameter. Also coroutines are normally the better option because they don't use reflection.
🔵 Call a coroutine with StartCoroutine(myFunction()) instead of using a string. Also look into async methods as an alternative.
🔵 Use the event keyword when you declare an action variable
🔵 Singletons are a contentious topic and are probably better suited for small to medium size games. Use them carefully or look into dependency injection as an alternative.
🔵 I made a mistake in the code for implementing a singleton. Don't destroy the original instance, destroy the new class. It should be
if (Instance != null && Instance != this) {
Destroy(this);
return;
}
Instance = this;
🔵 Scriptable objects are not recently released… oops
Does it exist example project with the code?
@@toroddlnning6806 No sorry. I'm planning on releasing the game so I don't think I can do that.
@@TesseractDev ok, maybe later, in a few years!
I highly recommend using async/await instead of coroutines for a few reasons:
- Async functions can return values
- You can catch exceptions both outside and inside an async function
- Debugging experience is much better, the call stacks will make much more sense.
- It is easier to compose and combine async functions
- Use UniTask (free) for additional support such as WebGL support for some APIs and tracking long running leaked tasks.
Use the standard IProgress interface for reporting progress of long running tasks.
@@Sindrijo Coroutines are still better for when you need an action to happen on each frame, since you can only specify a time delay when using async.
Great video! It's awesome to see someone so young already so focused with writing good clean code!
Heyo code monkey
Of course code monkey is here this guy never misses anything about unity
Even Code Monkey approve! Good job my dude.
What I came here to say exactly, dude's amazing
yeah, Code Monkey, it is 🤨
8:00
for Invoking a method, it's better to use nameof(MethodName) instead of literal string so the name will be updated when you change the method name, as well as being able to view it with the method references, and the best of all, auto completion
I'm doing it only for the auto-completion :)
Most important: compile time spelling check.
I came for this comment, lol
As a developer with 5+ years of experiece who recently started to learn Unity and C# I would like to state that this is the best, most informative and well structured "tips" video I have ever seen. Great job!
Same, I worked with C++ for 6 years, and moving to Unity and C#, it's something easier (due to C# being globally easier to use) but at the same time really different, C# has stuff that C++ do not have or do differently. For example Interfaces Class and Unity Scriptable Objects is something new that I didn't knew about.
You should use the C# "event" keyword in order to protect the event's delegate (Action) from being invoked from outside the class in which it is declared. Without the "event" keyword, you risk the event being triggered at the wrong time.
Without the "event" keyword, it also becomes possible to accidentally overwrite the subscribers if you use = instead of +=
I didn't know that thanks!
@@TesseractDev sebastian lague has a series where he goes into more detail with events and delegates and their usecases in unity if you wanna check it out
Actually, use a public event _accessor_ with the _add_ and _remove_ blocks and keep the underlying event delegate protected or private. Event accessors cannot be invoked, they're only a gateway to subscribe/unsubscribe to events. In real life it's also good practice to have a private object like "objectLock" and use a lock(lockedObject) { ... } block inside of the add and remove blocks to prevent anything whacky ever happening if more than one threads tries to get at the event. Don't sit there and say "But I don't use threads, Jimmy!" lol, write correct/robust code because if you ever work with a team or publish some code you have no control over what people do ... they might create 20 threads and try to make them all subscribe and unsubscribe to the event in a tight loop lol, don't let that blood be on your hands ... nothing more embarrassing than finally having a real job and the software fails in some code _you_ wrote, because you thought following the advice of the language designers and senior engineers wasn't important ... so get in the habit of writing it correctly. There's an example of this whole pattern on Microsoft Learn for C#, just Google "C# event accessors" and learn the correct, modern way to use and expose events in C# ....
Also, most people don't know that Action and EventHandler are _not_ anything special, they're just regular-ass ol' delegates. You can make your own, too, with whatever parameters your heart desires. Then you can make them events with the event keyword, expose them with an event accessor and protect them from harm by an object lock. 🔐
However, using System.Action in an event pattern is really _not_ the appropriate design even though it works. An Action is kind of useless beyond simply triggering something with absolutely _no information_ whatsoever. That might seem cool in beginner projects where you have one thing that fires one kind of event, but in real-life software and games that would be rather useless and silly for anything that's important. The "proper" convention is that all events are generally supposed to take two parameters: (object sender, EventArgs e) ... but you can _specialize_ this for custom events. Make a small class that inherits from EventArgs and has some special event data it like "InputEventArgs" with key/control input data in it. The "sender" parameter is just whatever object is triggering and dispatching the event, most likely the class that contains/exposes it, so it just passes "this" into the sender parameter. That way, subscribers can know _which_ dispatcher fired the event in situations where you may have more than one instance of a thing exposing the same kinds of events. Also, define your own special delegates with a special name describing the kind of event it's for, and use those specific delegate types with the event keyword ... that way, another programmer can simply read the event signature and gather _all_ they need to know about it in one glance! Take this one for an example:
// custom delegate:
public delegate DamageHandler( object sender, DamageEventArgs dmg );
// custom event data:
public class DamageEventArgs: EventArgs {
// constructor omitted for space
//♤ Define your constructor here
// properties here:
public ICreature Victim { get; set; }
public IAgent Attacker { get; set; }
public bool WasAttacked =>
this.Attacker is not null;
public DmgType DmgFlags { get; set; }
// you get the idea ...
}
// -------------------------------------------------
// Now you actually use this stuff inside
// of a class that exposes events:
object objectLock = new();
event DamageHandler _creatureKilled;
public event DamageHandler CreatureKilled {
add {
lock(objectLock) {
_creatureKilled += value;
}
}
remove {
lock(objectLock) {
_creatureKilled -= value;
}
}
}
I bet that after reading that bit of code you're like "Whoa, I understand _exactly_ what that event represents!" even if you're not familiar with the proper usage of event patterns in C# ... you can clearly tell what the event is talking about and what its purpose is, and that's how you implement events properly, not with System.Action lol ... think about all the stuff you can do with the simple pattern I just showed you. This is really basic/intermediate C# stuff and it's the reason I urge people to read a complete C# book that has _nothing_ to do with Unity or anything library/framework/engine specific whatsoever, just learn proper C# and thank yourself later for that best month or two you ever spent ...
@@GameDevNerd this is extremely unnecessary. Explicit event accessors have virtually no mainstream use case except for maybe storing the delegates in a dictionary instead of the automatic delegate field.
Adding/removing handlers is thread safe so there is no need for a lock. Invoking with the null coalescing operator avoids the need for a null check. In other words, ignore the entire previous comment.
this is "stuff i heard about but didnt quite understand fully and i havent looked it up yet" THE VIDEO at least for me it is. i will probably come back to this a dozen of times. great work!
Something slightly more advanced, but that will help immensely once you get into the habit is unit testing.
This is probably easiest to do through the Unity Test Framework, this allows you to write code that tests a single function, and by keeping it around you'll be sure the feature isn't broken in a future update.
Say for instance you want to add recoil to your weapons, pushing the player back a bit whenever they fire. By writing a unit test you can ensure that the push is always opposite the direction fired. That way if you later add a weapon that fires in random directions you might discover that the random vector added to the aiming direction didn't get transferred to the recoil.
It's not just useful for catching errors in the future, but it also helps you write good code. If you want to test something but it's hard to do then it's often a sign that you did something wrong in the first place. For instance, let's say you can't test the cover mechanic because it requires the map to be loaded, and the timer to be running, and the network code to be loaded. That means your cover mechanic is dependent on all those other systems and is simply doing too much.
One nice way to ensure you test your code is to write the test first, so instead of adding the recoil to all the weapons *first* you add the test to make sure the recoil is pushing the character back first. Then you run your tests, this will give you a red flag for this feature. Then you add the feature and test again, now you get a green flag. Then finally you clean up by refactoring things before moving on.
In short: red-green-refactor.
The benefit of this is that you are sure you wrote your test properly. If for instance you check for the recoil that you don't have in the game yet, and the test says it's working then you know you have a bug in your test code. Same with running the test after adding the feature, now you're sure it can tell that the feature *is* working properly. That way you can be sure the test will alert you in the future if a bug creeps in.
It's a part of agile programming, if you want to look it up for more details. By using that I could handle a 300k+ lines of code project just fine on my own. Before adding unit tests there was always the concern that I forgot some edge case or broke existing functionality, and it was simply too much to manually test.
Finally, singletons can be hard to unit test, but you can make them work by adding extra code for swapping out the instance with a test one. Usually by changing it from a specific class to an interface instead. Then you can replace the singleton with a test version that just says okay to things you're not interested in testing at the moment. At that point it might be easier to simply give the class the interface implementation directly through a property, which is basically what "inversion of control" is about. Having external code provide the dependency your code requires instead of having it get the dependency itself.
Really wish a video like this was around back when I started Unity development six years ago, these really are some of the top priorties that new beginners should learn. Great video!
Great video! A brilliant shallow dive into a lot of concepts that was well delivered and very well edited. Kudos!
Not just showing the tips but explaining and showing the mechanics behind it and examples.
Great video to help with these things. Never knew about InvokeRepeating and it's practical use like that.
This is the video that i longed to have for years. I only tangentially got into programming and only ever learned what was needed to get the job done. This video made so many of the concepts that i kinda knew about but never fully grasped, trivially easy to understand. Stellar work on this video and many many thanks
Usually I prefer more in depth tutorials, but this was surprisingly a good style for this specific topic. Nice work!
Thank you for the valuable tips!
Going back into Unity development from other engines, and man this is the BEST refresher course I've ever seen. You just earned a new sub!
You came out of nowhere and your channel blew up! Glad I ran across this gem. Great work on this. I've learn alot in the pass 22 minutes.
Hey man! Normally i dont comment on videos, but… ive been doing software development (outside of gamedev) for 20+ years and only recently got into Unity. This video is very well thought out and full of good stuff. Really rare to find such a well structured set of tips. Thanks a lot and keep up the great work
Awesome! It's good to get approval from developers who have more experience than me.
@@TesseractDev As a software developer myself, I really can confirm that you not only did a great job structuring the most important tips, but also show some real-world examples why and how you can use them. This video should be an essential education source, for anyone that wants to develop in unity. Thank you very much for your afford in this video.
Yup.. also a 20+ years dev coming into the gaming world and wanting to tear my eyes out over some of the approaches that people take in these tutorials! Nice to know I'm not the only one trying to do this, though I have to ask, if you were going into the field as a senior dev, would you expect to get in as a senior dev, or do you think things are sufficiently different that not all your skills apply and you may have to take a mid-level dev position in a game manufacturer? With it being such a crowded market for devs, it's why I feel this is going to be more a hobby than a career!
Your video made me realize, that I am no longer a beginner. I understood all your tips and will be using them asap. Thank you so much for this video,
I have been working in Unity for many many years now, and these are some perfect examples of paradigms and patterns that I have learned over time after coding myself into a corner. One of the better unity tip or even coding tip video I have seen in a long time. I'm gonna save a link to this video in the root of my unity project as I develop so I can watch it from time to time as a reminder to not write silly code anymore. Great work, keep it up! =)
Well done! Such a concise and very important video, for programmers out there looking to improve their magic. Subscribed 😉
Extremely helpful video that introduced me to a few new concepts I had not encountered before. Great job!
This seems really useful and you explain things well. I would love to see some more basic-building-blocks and more in depth videos from you especially revolving around Unity. Thanks so much for this video!
This is EXACTLY what I was looking for!!! Thank you for taking the time to make this.
Nice work! A lot of hidden gems that make it easier working with Unity.
ENUMS and Serialization:
Be very careful when adding new enum values/options to an existing enum definition if you have already started using it in your project and you have that enum serialized anywhere (scene or prefab). Unity serializes enums as numbers by default, starting at 0, if you add a new option to the enum make sure that you at it at the END of the definition list because otherwise you may be 'redefining' what already serialized enum data will be deserialized back to.
You can also as an alternative, manually define the underlying value of each enum value, to have a concrete persistence regardless of additions
@@joshuacadebarber8992 this is what’s called a “pro move”
You did great explaining things in an easy to digest manner. I hope you post more in the future. Good luck with your game as well.
I am really impressed on how the video is structured and how many actual good tips of good clean code are here. Will be very helpful to many software engineers, thank you for your input
Glad you found it helpful!
Hey man, thank you for this video! This video will save so much resource for so many people and i think you should be awarded by Unity!
Exactly the video I’ve been looking for. Great stuff
Great video, thank you for these points, it is not very often to see more advanced architecture advise specifcally for Unity
Please Keep this series going, This video is pure gold
Really good tips! Thank you for sharing this, there're few good advanced unity videos out there.
I had troubles with Invoke when I was searching the reference of functions of coworkers, so I wouldn't recomend the usage of Invoke in medium or large projects. Also about UnityEvents, sometimes is messy go from code to inspector a lot of times searching which methods are called when an event is trigered, I suffer when I tried to set the game flow using those hahahaha lesson learned. :)
Such a relief I'm already doing most of these!! These are excellent tips, thanks a lot!
Version Control is huge, but being a "backup" is just the beginning. The true value is how it empowers development by being able to see the difference between what the before and after states, how it enables or disallows multiple members to make changes to the same file at the same time, and being able to go back in time to previous states of code or even the whole project. Great video =)
Great video! There’s tonnes of stuff in there that can take new unity devs a long time to get to.
I would have liked to see mention of using non-monobehaviour classes, the biggest change i noticed moving from hobby to professional was how often is write things like static service classes for manipulating objects/data, makes for reusable code and saves you a lot of hassle
This is brilliant @TesseractDev .Thanks for sharing!
Great job. It’s a good refresh of important ideals. I would have added state machines in their but I mean that’s alot to cover so elegantly.
👏👏👏👏 man, this video is a class! Congratulations, and thank you so much for sharing this knowledge
Very satisfying content brother. Loved it.
Thank you for making a video on how to make games, instead of just how to make features. I really appreciate the help!
Thank you! I’ve been trying to use car to simple of techniques to solve complex problems. It’s annoying how few unity tutorials teach more advanced methods. So again thank you for this it has been hugely helpful.
Nice job man! Grats ;)
Valuable tips.
always like to see cool new unity stuff for advanced devs, very cool :D
Even though I already knew all of these tricks, I found this video to be a nicr refresher of possibilities you have to structure and improve code as well as show me that even though there's a lot left to learn, I've also already come a long way :)
That's literally what i inversio understood during developing my last game. Really good kickstart to good code, like it.
I have to admit, that when I saw 22 minutes long video, I thought this is us yet another artificially stretched video about Unity basics... and it frankly is, to some extend. You managed to cover the basics but I'm such pace, that I had to pause it several times and in the end I wished this would be bit longer. To cover these basics, you would otherwise spent hours of searching for other fragmented pieces of such important basics.
This is very well done my friend... Keep up!
This is sooooo awesome! My God this is great. Keep up the good work.
Awesome video! :D Nice to see something advanced for once
I'm planning to watch this video every month so I can include all the tips in my work. Thanks for this, i'ts really helpfull.
Not even what I was looking for, but the advice given was so good that I watched all the way through.
Incredible video! Please do more!
this was an excellent video, thanks for the ideas!
nice job with this video , I can feel you worked a lot for this. good one
Good Job!! The amount of skill you have at a young age is very impressive. Keep Going!
Thanks for these super cool tips! I'm working on game dev since 2018 and I agree with you on all of them! 😎👍
The intro is just speaks so much facts, Amazing video.
Thanks!
The best tutorial I've found on clean code... Great work
Glad it helped!
This is about 5 years of head-butting, condensed in 20 minutes. Great contribution.
Hey, you just answered to the many questions I was looking for.. especially the events and coroutines.. ... Thank you , cheers.
Yay!
Kid, this video is exactly what everyone needs to hear. Incredible work, one tiny bit of feedback would have been to add a data oriented section for people who want the kind of performance that OOP cant provide.
Great Video, especially for young developers who don't have formal training in programming.
You brought up some handy tips, particularly those relating to Object Oriented Programming.
Keep it up👍.
Thanks for the tips! I agree, it’s nice to have us young guys care about clean code! This was great help for my game!
w vid. learned some of these in my data structures class, cool to see how it translates to unity too
Perfect video! Thank you so much!
This tips are awesome and is for all levels in my opinion either if you are a beginner, intermediate or advance developer
incredible. bookmarking this for later reference
Really great content, keep it up man 😊
This was the ultimate "how to less likely to drop yet another project unfinished" video for me. It contains so much information that I knew existed but never knew where to look for it.
It was so useful thank you!
Also, nowadays I don't really finish any videos because I get bored of them. But yours was so entertaining to watch and I even learned from it. Thanks again!
Great to hear!
Awesome video man, keep it up!
Creating assembly definition is really helpful to speed up compiling, I wish I knew it years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time.
DAMN THIS ANSWERD SO MANY QUESTIONS I HAD
thx for this video
you are a genius and thanks for the tips , I need more stuff for this since im reaching mid level or senior level unity dev i struggle with clean code practices or tips
Really nice tips, thanks!
As someone who's just getting into more game development, this video is super helpful! Ngl may need to watch it again and take some notes for reference 😅
That's good to hear!
Hey! Cool and well structured video. I've been using Unity for years as a indie game developer and I must say your set of advices are really good. Coroutines are awsome and in my humble opinion they have and will have a place in Unity game development. That said, for some situations where you have to perform a bunch of secuential tasks, perhaps you may like to take a look at Async/Await ;) The very best of luck with your game 😁
Events and interface makes the code modular and decoupled alot that once you start using it, u will appreciate it alot
Exactly! Modular and decouple are good words that I probably should've used.
Really interesting and helpful, thank you
Just starting game making and programming. This is invaluable to getting a lay of the land. I might be trying to run before I walk, but all these seem to make sense even if most of it is going over my head. Thank you!
Hi there, I just started last week. Do you feel or are you any closer to making your first game? I feel like this goal is years away for me and it's all overwhelming
I did a bad thing and took a break. Life got busy and such. Id say just start on small projects and keep building up. I did a flappy bird tutorial and it made me hopeful. I might redo it because there are so many add-ons that can be used to learn. @@FenrirFinance
Very helpful, thank you!
Absolutely phenomenal video sir
Great video, thanks for sharing.
The more advanced stuff still a bit confusing for me, but I will get there (:
Awesome vid ✍🏻
Thank you
Most importantly: LINK THINGS UP IN CODE!
I think this is an often-overlooked issue with projects that become bigger. The Unity UI is great for novices and small projects, but in the end you want a debuggable and searchable dependency overview.
The ironic thing is that it’s not a full item on your list, but a side comment about your preference.
Anyway: some more tips:
- return an IEnumerable on the public get of a list or array, so callers can’t change it that easily (except for casting and other reflection utils)
- end multi-line enums and list initializers with a comma, so it’s easy to add, delete or reorder the items.
- coroutines run on the component so make sure to not disable it. Better yet, have a “coroutine” instance that you can address at any point.
- use the nameof(Function) variation of Invoke to get compile-time checks on your function name.
- scripts should destroy themselves, not the other Instance (whoops)
- don’t go overboard with inheritance and interfaces when s nice _type enum and case statement will do. This will often create less messy code, especially when they do similar things with different values (easier to compare the implementation differences at first glance)
- if you have lists of content (levels, weapons, avatars, spells) consider going for a data-driven method and loading stuff like textures and scriptable objects through addressables and a parameterized path. Instead of hard-linking it in Unity UI. Your loading time will thank you as well.
For the last tip, do you mean that - for example; I have 300 upgrades in my game as scriptable objects. And I have one scriptable object for a database. I have a function that finds the resources folder with my upgrades and attatches them to the database? Rather than drag clicking them in
Please do more content like this.While theres tons of stuff out there for how to make a character run or shoot or move a camera theres much less content out there (at least for c#) from a beginner friendly perspective talking about how to write efficient/clean code.
incredible video ❤ this video can be easily aplied to any popular game engine you work with
Great video! Thank you.
Very useful video. Thanks!
Your video is awasame and super-useful. It's really well made. Thanks ;)
Amazing explanation of important programming principles
Thanks!
Great video! I have yet to tackle a large unity project but I do hope to at some point soon!! 😬
Good luck!
Me: Moves hand for a sec
Unity: *Reloading Domain*
Awesome video! And to be honest, a lot of this advice can be applied for non-gaming products as well!
I agree with more than 75% of them so good advice!
Nice, it’s also helpful for non game programmers :) Great explaining.
I’m glad!
good job my friend. I'm a self-taught game developer too and this video was really really helpful to me. Thanks a lot 🙏 . be strong and continue 💪
The video may be helpful for beginners, the advices are pretty good, but I don't know how advanced it's. Like it's all pretty basic.
I would like to see more architectural advice, because it's really the things you need to create big games. Like what is composition root, what is ordered initialization etc.
And I wouldn't also recommend people to use inheritance in their game core logic, like your guns example. It has too many problems for quickly changable game features. Composition is the way to go. Reuse by calling other objects' methods.
Fair enough. Everyone has different definitions of “advanced”. This was just a collection of programming devices that aren’t normally covered in beginner tutorials and that I myself didn’t learn for many years. Maybe I’ll make a part 2 when I am more advanced lol.
I see that you’re using fusion. What a wonderful framework!
One of the best video i ever seen
There is definitely a major lack of people talking about advanced coding practices in gamedev, especially when it often becomes the biggest barrier for people trying to make games as their projects inevitably devolve into an unworkable pile of spaghetti. Hope to see more similar content
this is by far the most useful unity coding video i've come across on youtube. you have been sent by god himself, thank you angel boy
Great presantation, keep going!
Thank you! Will do!
Good video, thanks !