Manually upgrade to C# 8

[Kurt-Dekker]

Maintaining software in general is hard.

Modern software is a living thing that if not maintained and cared for will quickly rot and die and become necrotic baggage in your project. The more of your project that is allowed to fall into this state of disrepair, the harder it will be to fix (more confounding issue between parts) and the less-well-equipped you will be to fix it because you haven’t already been doing it.

While you might think that it is easier to maintain by not upgrading, this is an illusion.

Yes, it may be easier for some amount of time.

But at some point, something external to your world will require an update.

Maintaining “special snowflake” software is even HARDER than if you stay current. At least if you stay current you’re likely to find plenty of contemporary guidance (here, Stack Overflow, documentation, the internets at large) to help you.

I’m not advocating upgrading your project “just for fun,” but you already have identified a need by saying you want a particular version of C#. Don’t make it hard on yourself by trying to get that C# update by making snowflake project changes.

This also gets to why you even care what version of C# you’re on. If you are using a third party library that requires it, you are almost certainly going to need to upgrade other parts of your toolchain for that library.

@theCodeHermit

I am aware of the existence of version control…

Then use it. That way you have a fighting chance of trying to upgrade without sinking your entire project. You really are just one click away from complete disaster if you’re not using source control. For instance, if you had some file somehow get corrupted and prevent your project from launching, how could you even begin to reason about it?

Source control would show you the corrupted file and you could revert it with a click.

PROPERLY CONFIGURING AND USING ENTERPRISE SOURCE CONTROL

I’m sorry you’ve had this issue. Please consider using proper industrial-grade enterprise-qualified source control in order to guard and protect your hard-earned work.

Personally I use git (completely outside of Unity) because it is free and there are tons of tutorials out there to help you set it up as well as free places to host your repo (BitBucket, Github, Gitlab, etc.).

You can also push git repositories to other drives: thumb drives, USB drives, network drives, etc., effectively putting a complete copy of the repository there.

As far as configuring Unity to play nice with git, keep this in mind:

Prefab links keep getting dumped on Git pull

There really isn’t any fix because git works perfectly with Unity when configured properly. Best practices involve saving your work and closing Unity before using git. But if you understand how Unity does and does not flush changes to disk (or at least ALWAYS do a save-project), you can get away with leaving Unity open. The only thing linking EVERYTHING together in Unity is the GUID assigned to a script or asset. Name is irrelevant. Only the GUID connects it. This GUID is in the meta file. I…

I usually make a separate repository for each game, but I have some repositories with a bunch of smaller test games.

Here is how I use git in one of my games, Jetpack Kurt:

2 steps backwards

Yeah, what Praetor said is it… Debug.Log is your friend, and also since this is animation related, you can open up the Animator window when you expect the animations to go, and actually visually see where the state machine is, see which state it thinks it is in. You can combine this with Debug.Log() output at the locations where you set the animations to be what you think they should be, and that should lead you to some intel. I highly recommend setting up git source control. It really plays ni…

Using fine-grained source control as you work to refine your engineering:

When to make a separate object or class/script? Help me think like a programmer! (Example in text.)

This is a reasonable initial approach. The problem is you have listed the parts, but you haven’t really listed how they interact, and even if you did, it’s still sorta up to you how to organize it. Only YOU will know how to organize it, and the only way you can tell is to do the work. I recommend this: first, develop ALWAYS with source control (such as git), and every time you get even the slightest thing working, commit those changes with good commit messages. Then move to the next thing, c…

Share/Sharing source code between projects:

Your techniques to share code between projects?

I have found that bundling your own code into DLLs only serves to slow down your workflow. I base this on several years of experience dealing with other teams well-intentioned packaging mishaps. With games, it is almost always useful to reach into library code, make a temporary tweak to isolate a problem, and then revert it. With DLLs this is impossible, making workflow harder and more brittle. I prefer to share source code at the C# level. That way I can reach into libraries trivially and inje…

Setting up an appropriate .gitignore file for Unity3D:

Removing IL2CPP_cache from Project

Not sure what you are "auto generating" with... I usually start from one of my other projects, or a gitignore example online, and reason about all the parts inside it, and start from there. Like any other configuration change, after you make it, pay attention for a while to make sure it is what you want. You can always clone the repo somewhere else to verify that the correct files are being tracked. Doing so to a brand-new computer is the acid test to make sure you can still bui…

Generally setting Unity up (includes above .gitignore concepts):

How to Git with Unity

It is only simple economics that you must expend as much effort into backing it up as you feel the work is worth in the first place. Digital storage is so unbelievably cheap today that you can buy gigabytes of flash drive storage for about the price of a cup of coffee. It’s simply ridiculous not to back up.

If you plan on joining the software industry, you will be required and expected to know how to use source control.

“Use source control or you will be really sad sooner or later.” - StarManta on the Unity3D forum boards