I am making an Android app in Unity. Google recommends using a symbols.zip, which Unity auto-generates. However, the symbols.zip that Unity is generating for my app is over 1 GB, and the max size that Google will accept is 300 MB.
How can I reduce the size of my symbols.zip?
I tried to run a converter for my VS solution, need CMake eventually for Emscripten, the generated files looked very barebones though and I got overwhelmed so I gave up for now
user92578
I might be better off just learning how CMake works and doing it from scratch
I suppose you can go the other way around and use CMake and ditch the VS solution? (Didn't MS add a "generate your solution using a CMakeList.txt file" feature lately?)
We're kinda trying to support Linux because sanitizers are extremely good and not available on Windows. Though apparently that's not entirely true anymore.
user92578
I haven't found VS's build tools too simple, on the contrary they provide very good customization for compiler settings, allow build hooks, precompiled headers, and can hook into something like vcpkg
@0x00004 An issue that can come from using simply a VS solution is that when you update your project, you need to go through the process of updating the .sln and .vcxproj that compose it. It's all right when you're alone and you work only on one project, but when you're a team and you need to maintain multiple projects, this becomes a hell. Stuff like CMake is stable enough that it will interface between what you want and what you need when new VS versions become available.
I just finished the Godot introduction through to the "create your first game" tutorial.
Working in a UI-based game editor is weird.
Working in a UI-based environment at all is weird.
I mean, I've worked in Windows Forms briefly, but that was so awful I'm just ... leaving it well over there. Out of my memory, preferably, as much as possible.
But Godot handles instancing and event hooks and properties via UI quite a lot. All of it is optional—you can do all the same things with just code—but the tutorial took me through using the UI to do it.
Like, music and sound effects are actual objects you put in the scene tree, rather than instances you declare in code. (Functionally nearly the same thing, just a matter of whether they're visible in the editor or not.)
I can definitely fully optionally do that, and simply instantiate a sound clip object inside the Main.gd script. Having it inside the scene is functionally doing the exact same thing but with UI.
For example, not pictured in this scene are the Mobs, which get instantiated via code. The player however is instantiated in the UI.
(You can however see Mob.tscn and Mob.gd in the bottom left, which is their scene and their script respectively.)
Godot uses "scenes" heavily. At first I thought a scene was a level or a screen, but instead it's basically an assemblage of stuff. I have a Player scene, which defines the player character and their controls. (You can see the player character with the big eyeball in the screenshot.) There's also a Mob scene defining the enemies.
The HUD itself is also a scene — that's the thing that contains the score, the "Dodge the Creeps!" message, and the Start button that you can see.
One thing I found really interesting was the MobPath and the MobSpawnLocation.
MobPath is just ... a path, that I defined as a rectangle around the edges of the screen. MobSpawnLocation is a path follower, so it exists at some interval along the path.
To spawn enemies, I set the path follower to a random point along the path, and that's the spawn location. The path follower also recognises the normal of the path at whatever point it's at, so I use that for a direction, plus/minus some variance.
Having been shown that through the tutorial that seems like the kind of thing a lot of games might use.
Back when I wrote an answer that basically said just spawn things at regular intervals along a line, I didn't imagine there might be tools like this that would automatically just happily traverse a path exactly this way. I was imagining in my head "and here's how I'd write a script to do that for me, including having to account for overflow as it moves between all the vectors that would be involved."
But I could use a path and pathfollower to do that, here, and just tell the pathfollower to progress along the path I lay down myself.
And that is neat
This would of course also power things like platforms on rails, but I never imagined using something like this for deciding on spawn points across an area (for enemies, for scenery, etc)
in writing all of that, i imagine i'm saying basically the equivalent of like "y'all! this language has classes! would you believe it? you can just define them and then like, instantiate them!" in the scale of game development expertise :D
or like "y'all! sprite sheets! just check this out! you can have a sheet, of sprites!"
I am making an Android app in Unity. Google recommends using a symbols.zip, which Unity auto-generates. However, the symbols.zip that Unity is generating for my app is over 1 GB, and the max size that Google will accept is 300 MB.
How can I reduce the size of my symbols.zip?
