Guest Blog Post – RogueSharp Tutorial Series Ported to Unity

Introduction

I’m excited that one of the visitors to the blog took it upon himself to port the code from the RogueSharp tutorial series to Unity. I asked if he would be interested in writing a guest blog post and he agreed! A huge thank you to Brian for all the hard work with the port and for the  information posted below.

– Faron

About the Author

First off, thank you Faron Bracy for developing the RogueSharp library and all the time you’ve spent developing the library and writing tutorials on it!

I have been developing with Unity for some time now and have been looking for a C# Rogue or 2D RPG library. There a couple Rogue/RPG libraries on the Unity asset store but the libraries seem to be too integrated or reliant on Unity. I was looking for a pure C# implementation and something I could work into Unity but change graphics engine later if I wanted. Thus RogueSharp.

About the Port to Unity

I developed a port of Faron’s RogueSharp v3 tutorial series with Unity except I ended up using RogueSharp V4! I originally went through the entire tutorial series using RLNet Console, which gave me a comfortable feel for the library and how I wanted to approach integrating with Unity. With the Unity integration and some of my own personal preferences, I’ve made a numbers changes to the original tutorial for the Unity port. Some of notable changes:

1. Uses Unity (version 2018.2.1f1) instead of RLNet Console, so no more RLColor or RLConsole calls;
2. The code has been reorganized mostly in a MVC pattern. There are no dependencies in the Model and Controller logic against Unity. Only View logic has any reliance on Unity. This could make ports on other consoles/backends easier (maybe?);
3. Uses diagonal movement in RogueSharp v4 including monster pathfinding;
4. Most static references removed, passes data by reference. Personal preference, I’m not big on lots of static functions;
5. Uses RogueSharp v4, not v3 as in the original tutorial series. Only caused a few minor changes to the tutorial code;
6. Object pooling used from Catlike coding,https://catlikecoding.com/unity/tutorials/ for Unity GameObjects that represent cells on the console. This was necessary as the height/width sizes of the console cause too many GameObects to be created (thousands). This caused significant slowdowns in the FPS, so I needed an optimization early in the process. As a result, the View logic will only display tiles/cells that are visible in the Camera and dynamically change the viewable tiles/cells as the player moves. This allows for arbitrarily large maps;
7. There are few odds and ends added to the code that are placeholders for a future implementation that allows switching between ASCII characters and graphical tiles.

The port can be found at: https://github.com/Olivexe/RogueSharpTutorialUnityPort. Along with the project source code, I’ve put in a Unity Package file, named RogueSharpTutorialPort.unitypackage. You should be able to import the package file into a new Unity Project, click the sample scene, and hit play. It should play exactly as the tutorial. There is now a second branch in my port that I am slowly porting the remainder of the complete RogueSharp tutorial over to Unity.

Thank you,

Brian “Olivexe” Pleffner

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