Hey. I know Unity is very good about storing all the assets internally, but is there any way I can force it to store the art assets externally? Maybe even use some type of XML or TXT file to dictate what should be loaded when and some simple gameplay variables? The goal is to make it easy for players who don’t have Unity to mod my game.
I’m leafing through the documentation, and so far it looks like you can’t even tell Unity to read and parse external txt files… hopefully I’m wrong about this, or maybe someone’s made a plugin?
There’s quite a few topics about reading external text files if you look around. In short, you use .NET for that. You can also use the WWW class to read external .jpg and .png files easily (just use “file://” instead of “http://”). You can read arbitrary binary files (using ReadAllBytes or some other method), but you have to parse them yourself. Also look on the wiki for a script to do mesh serializing.
That’s for the stand-alone and doesn’t work with web players as far as I know.
Does this mean I need to use .NET as my scripting language? Most of the tutorials I’ve seen so far have used JavaScript. Or can I just mix and match the different scripts depending on what utility I need?
I haven’t worked with the .NET API before. I’m not even sure what an API is. Is it documented on this site or would I need to go to some .NET site to get a list of all the commands and what they do?
Application Programming Interface. You can use the Microsoft .NET reference or the Mono documentation, which is less annoying but also incomplete. This is one of a number of text read/writing topics which should get you started.
I notice it uses an import command with no other explaination. Do I need to download some kinda library and set it up first? Or is that included with Unity?
Ah, okay. I’ve done this before in Flash when working with objects defined in certian packages. You import the library (in this case System.IO) and then the objects and methods in that library become exposed and ready to use in the current block of code.
I guess I’ll have to start digging through all that documentation. I need to get a grasp of the commands at my disposal before I can even begin planning what I’m about to do.
Um, okay… in the .NET Framework Class Library documentation, I’ve found the entry for the System.IO Namespace, but I don’t see any System.IO.WriteLine method listed here.
Is this the wrong version of the documentation? Am I just reading it wrong? What gives?
Edit: Okay, I get it now. Clicking on the class name won’t give you a detailed description of the class like in the Flash documentation. Instead it just gives you a brief summary and some crappy technical details. In order to get method names and such, you need to click on the left and expand the class’s entry on the tree. That’s… both more consise and more obtuse. I’m literally 50/50 on whether or not this is a better way of organizing the information.
