Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
49 lines (34 loc) · 3.04 KB

Development.md

File metadata and controls

49 lines (34 loc) · 3.04 KB
Raw

This is a brief developer's guide to the AR Biosphere project. It assumes you have little to no knowledge of Unity.

Environment

This project was built with Unity 2021.03.19f1. You should use the same version of Unity or higher to avoid compatibility issues.

This project also uses Firebase, which is not included in the repository because of size and dependency issues. To import it to your local project, follow the instructions in the Firebase Unity SDK documentation. (Step 1-3 are already done in the repository, so you only need to follow step 4.)

Note: If you have dependency errors follow this https://stackoverflow.com/a/57361245/12374111

Project Structure

The Unity project is located in the app/ folder. Most of the workflow is done in the app/Assets/ folder.

Scenes

You can think of a scene in Unity like an activity in Android. A scene contains a collection of GameObjects organized into a hierarchy Some of the notable objects in the hierarchy include:

  • Camera: The camera that renders the scene.
  • AR Session Origin and AR Session: These objects manage the AR scene and contain an AR camera.
  • Canvas: The UI canvas that contains all the UI elements. Should go with an EventSystem object.
  • Custom objects: These are the objects that we create in the project ourselves.

Note: Git can't resolve merge conflicts in scenes, neither does Unity Editor (There may be a plugin for this). So if you are working on a scene, make sure to commit your changes before pulling from the remote repository and be careful when working with other people on the same scene.

Prefabs

Prefabs are reusable objects that can be instantiated in the scene. They are useful for creating objects that are used multiple times in the scene.

In the context of this project, prefabs are used to create the 3D models that are placed in the scene. See Assets/Scripts/ObjectManager.cs to see how prefabs are placed in the scene.

Asset Bundles

In this project we do not put prefabs directly in the scene. Instead, we use asset bundles to load the prefabs into the scene. Asset bundles are stored in Firebase Storage and downloaded to the device and unpacked when needed. This is done in Assets/Scripts/Database.cs.

To create an Asset Bundle, go to Assets/BuildAssetBundles in the Unity Editor. This will create the bundles in the app/Assets/AssetBundles folder for both Android and iOS. You can then upload them to Firebase Storage. The Assets/Editor/BuildAssetBundles.cs script is used for the build process.

Tutorial: https://youtu.be/twzfpuaM-Js

Note: the current script for database does not handle offline connection. This is something that could be improved.

Scripts

Runtime C# scripts can be found in the Assets/Scripts folder.

Classes that inherit from MonoBehaviour can be attached to GameObjects in the scene. Instances of these classes cannot be created directly via a constructor, but are created by Unity when the GameObject is instantiated in the scene.

Tests

UI

Animations