Playing Around at the Bit Level

This weeks adventure has been exploring object serialization. Initially I was using the serializable attribute to convert my objects into byte arrays but for some objects such as the voxel chunks this is far from ideal. Since I don’t want to handle serialization with 2 different methods I’ve decided to bite the bullet and roll my own set up.

Connecting the Pieces

It’s easy to forget just how many parts you’ve removed until it comes time to put them all back together. I know I’m probably not alone when I say I’ve fallen victim to scope creep many times now. In the end you always tell yourself never again yet it keeps happening…

Getting Closer.

I ran into a few set backs this weekend, and I’m a little annoyed but at the same time the civic is really close to being done. I started off by prepping the transmission and engine for being mated together.

Restoring the transmission

My girlfriend and I went on a road trip to Vermont to pick up this transmission. Funny enough I wasn’t able to find only a transmission so I had to buy a B18b1 engine to get this guy. I didn’t really want to do a B18 swap however so I managed to sell off the engine (for stupid cheap…). Here’s how it looked before touching it at all. The dust shield got a little mangled up but a hammer ’taps’ with the hammer straightened it out.

New Transmission Mount Installed

Progress wise not too much more has been done on the Civic this week. I had to help out my girlfriend put new front brakes + an oil change so I wasn’t feeling too motivated after that. My Dad helped out and welded in the new transmission bracket though. It came out pretty awesome and should (hopefully) have no problem mounting up the B swap.

Building Up the Network Logic

While this week may not have much to show for it has built a solid foundation for networking. I spent some time refactoring the pre-existing network logic to try to clean things up. I really didn’t like how the NetServerManager and NetClientManager derived from a base class of NetManager that had a NetMessageProcessor component. It was gross having to call that and subscribe to it’s message events. I also didn’t care for how each message had it’s own event. To try to curtail this redundancy I came up with the following solution.

I’m in the middle of swapping a B20B into my 1993 civic, and I had to buy (just about) every bolt / nut on the engine and transmission since I was missing so many. I also had the pleasure of tracking down all this information from various forums and sources. To try and help any others who are partaking in a similar project I’ve compiled a list of what I found below.

Wrapping it up

It’s funny, you never realize how many things are missing until you try to finish up your project. I spent today going over the motor ensuring I had everything I needed for it. Turns out I was missing quite a few bolts, and some misc small things.

I like projects

And I’m the kind of person that can’t leave a car alone. My civic is a 1993 DX hatch that I picked up off a friend of a friend 3 years ago. When I first bought it, it was an automatic and 100% stock. Cut to today and it’s totally different, it’s gone through rust repair, a paint job, and currently another motor swap. If your interested in it’s full history check out my build thread on D-Series.org. Currently however it looks like this:

Sometimes we want code that can run outside of Unity and that can make things tricky when it comes to writing text to console. Unity has it’s own set of methods for writing to it’s command console via the Debug class with the most commonly used one being Debug.Log(). However in the event you want to create a library of code that can be run within Unity or in the command console (say a game server for example) you’ll need a way to differentiate between the running environments. Instead of wrapping all our Debug.Log() calls in preprocessor directives such as #IF UNITY_EDITOR we can write a simple logging class to handle it for us. While we’re at it well add the ability to write log files since they can be quite useful.