Unity Developer Mode toggle information.

Graphics Shaders & Materials
1

I stumbled upon this topic on https://www.unity3dtips.com/zh/unity-fix-blurry-textures-on-mipmap/. I understood that I could simply toggle it on from Preferences, and it’s pretty cool that I can control texture values like mipmaps.

However, I was trying to find more information about the risks and what else I could be exposed to and achieve by enabling Developer Mode. I would appreciate any information. Do you guys use it? If so, for what purposes? Is there a risk associated with leaving it enabled? Also, what other interesting features can I be exposed to by enabling it?

2

No information available. This is a hidden (not public) feature, used only by Unity staff internally. Use at your own risk.

Seriously, for that? :roll_eyes:

Mipmap bias is part of the API and I bet it can even be controlled by Importer presets. In any case it’s a simple editor script away from making it adjustable.

Either this author has absolutely not the slightest bit of professional attitude or experience with Unity, or ulterior motives.

3

Just to be clear, that wasn’t directed at you. :wink:

I do wonder about the “tips” some folks put up there on the web, and this stands out as one of the more ludicrous ones. You are not at fault for following this advice, but the person publishing it should know better than this. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this website providing bad advice - be it trivial advice, lists of every imaginable cause/effect, repeating what’s in the manual, or promoting outdated tech/processes.

4

this is one of the first things that show up when searching for this issue. So for unity beginners it still leaves some questions as to how to actually make it.
From what i can see ( i am very new at unity ) you make presets based off an assets current settings, meaning this mipmap thing still isn’t available.

An editor script i dont know how to make yet either, but i suppose that’s the next best step

5

the easiest for me ended up being following the initial tutorial, by making a temporary context menu developer script.

using UnityEngine;

public class SetEditorMode : MonoBehaviour
{
     [ContextMenu("Toggle Editor Mode")]
	 void toggle_editor_mode(){
		bool current = UnityEditor.EditorPrefs.GetBool("DeveloperMode");
		UnityEditor.EditorPrefs.SetBool("DeveloperMode", !current);
	 }
}

place on some object, toggle it. change mip setting, reimport texture, and exit it again.
And then after that, make a new texture preset based on this texture, it will have this secret dev setting included. I dont have any stake in what is bad or good advice.

So take what i did with a grain of salt

6

DeveloperMode isn’t really useful if you’re using Unity (rather than developing it). It enables a bunch of extra menu items for testing Unity itself, it enables extra asserts during various editor operations (so it makes it slower), it draws little random colored circles on each editor window (so we would notice if any window starts continuously redrawing, which no editor window should do) and a few other minor things.

If you’re curious, you can look at our reference code at what calls this API: UnityCsReference/Editor/Mono/Unsupported.bindings.cs at d253e09acffc9803eb9d7cd77f4768d38860d66e · Unity-Technologies/UnityCsReference · GitHub. It won’t have the C++ usages but at least you will be able to see what C# code does with it.