Unity’s coroutine support is great. So great that it’s easy to go overboard and end up with too many of them. That could be for any number of reasons. Perhaps the coroutines are using too much memory or have too many files open at once. In any case, you’ll need to find a way to limit how many are running at a single time. Today’s article introduces a solution to the problem that queues coroutines so you never have too many running. Read on to learn about the solution and for the class that implements it.
Archive for category Unity
When we just need a quick and dirty type to hold some values, C#’s anonymous types fit the bill: var person = { First="John", Last="Doe", Age=42 }. On the down side, since these types are anonymous they have no explicit type. The var variable is strongly typed, but you have to use the object type when passing them to other functions. But then how do you get the fields back out? Today’s article shows you how so that anonymous types will be more useful to you. Read on to find out how to recover anonymous types!
One of the advantages of Unity using Mono and IL2CPP as scripting engines is that any .NET language can be used to code your game or app. Today I’ll show an example of that in the form of F#. How do you go about using an unofficially supported language like this? Read on to for the step-by-step tutorial!
As programmers, we concatenate strings all the time. Should we worry about the performance? How about the amount of garbage we’re producing for the garbage collector? Today’s article runs a quick test to find out!
Last week I covered the performance of cryptographic hash algorithms like MD5 and SHA-1. This week I’ll continue by testing the performance of the closely-related encryption algorithms. This includes algorithms like AES, DES, RC2, Rijndael, and TripleDES. Which is fastest? Does the key size, block size, padding mode, or cipher mode matter? Read on to see!
Sooner or later you’ll need to use a cryptographic hash function. Sometimes it’s to quickly check if two large byte arrays are the same, sometimes it’s for interoperability with some server, and other times it’s to obfuscate a string. In any case, performance of the various hash algorithms varies wildly. Today’s article performance tests all 27 hash algorithm permutations to see which is fastest and which is slowest. Read on for the performance test results!
LINQ expressions aren’t the same thing as LINQ queries. They’re more like reflection for the syntax of C# itself. It’s a fascinating—and powerful—area of the language and I’ll be exploring it a little in today’s article.
List<T> (and SafeList) have a great feature for fast lookups: BinarySearch. However, the list needs to be sorted in order to use it. You could call Sort() first, but that would give back all the performance you got with BinarySearch. It’s better to just keep the list sorted all the time. Unfortunately, there is no function on IList<T>, List<T>, or SafeList to efficiently insert an item into a list that’s already sorted. Today’s article presents an extension function that adds this functionality on to IList<T> and even the non-generic IList so your list will always be sorted for quick lookups with BinarySearch. Read on for the code, unit tests, and a performance test showing the advantages you stand to gain.
The first version of SafeList tried to address a common problem: inserting and removing elements into a List<T> while you loop over it. It had a lot of problems though and ended up being pretty much useless. Today’s article presents SafeList 2.0, a radically-improved version that really solves the problem so you can actually use it as a drop-in replacement for List<T>. Read on for the details, the source code, and even the unit tests that prove it handles all the nasty corner cases for you!
C# delegates can be used like function pointers. Assign it once and you don’t have to use an if over and over. But is the overhead of the delegate worth it? Today’s article puts it to the test to see if this a valid performance boost versus just using an if over and over. Read on to see if a delegate is worth your time.