Unity and SmartFox Server Update

Whew, I did it!

I spent the last four hours of my life trying to fix code and implement features. I accomplished what I set for goals for myself today. These goals were to streamline the Unity UI and get players registered into the score database table when they register for the game.

The Unity GUI is a powerful tool. It allows for a lot of customization. Add that to their already powerful scripting engine, they have it made. The GUI buttons and test fields that I already had in the game seemed generic and stale. As they should have been. They were using the engine default styles. This was easily fixed by exposing a public GUIStyle to the editor and applying it to all the buttons in that level. Finally, I made it easier to position the buttons and see changes by exposing the rectangles that define their position width and height to the editor. This allowed for a more streamlined approach of custom GUIStyles.

The server side code was a bit of an issue. There were two issues in my way that soaked up a lot of my time. These issues were a dumb mistake on my part and a issue with SmartFox Server itself. The first mistake was that I was setting query executes to not autocommit. With the jdbc drivers this caused any update or insert SQL queries to not be, well executed. The problem was that I was stupidly not calling the connection to commit the changes. The second issue was something I had not run into before. The SignUpAssistantComponent from SmartFoxServer allows you to do pre and post processing by defining an interface. The interface takes several parameters. These are the user, the SFSObject, and the config itself. The preprocessor worked fine with all of the parameters. However, the postprocessor seemed to have lost scope of the SFSObject. Any calls to get any type of data resulted in NullPointerExceptions. I circumnavigated this issue by providing the needed data (the username of the registering player) as a user variable for the temporarily logged in guest user during registration.

All in all, it was a long day and I spent what seemed too long working in circles. I am glad that I was able to accomplish my goals. Soon, I will have a video up with some in-game theme music and *hopefully* some artwork.