Hello, pergonauts, and welcome back to another Tuesday dev blog. This week we have a couple of unglamorous, but all-the-more important updates for you.
As you may have heard, a critical security issue was recently exposed that affects all Unity games made with engine versions 2017.1 and after. You may have even noticed games in your steam library being temporarily delisted or requiring an immediate update.
It goes without saying that this is a major pain for developers who now need to update their live builds ASAP, and it may have some worrying impacts on game preservation. For the Dandelion Void team, though, the silver lining is that this is the excuse we needed to update to the Unity 6 engine!
Up to now we’ve been developing on a "Long Term Stable" version of Unity 2022.3 that was last updated in September of 2023, over two years ago. Like most developers, we’re cautious about when we change our engine versions; there’s always a few things that break here and there, and all the bugfixing can suck time away from gameplay features.
With that said, it makes a lot of sense for us to invest in a more up to date version. 2022.3 is old now, and it’s only getting older! Being on Unity 6 will give us access to the latest and greatest from Unity, and engine bugs we encounter will have a higher likelihood of being fixed by their team. We’re also interested in some of the new profiling tools they have been working on, as well as the better contrast on the editor UI.
What else is new with us? Well, speaking of tooling updates, we’ve been giving some TLC to our Sickle level editor! We’re making these tools both for us and for future Dandelion Void modders, so it’s important for us that they feel great to use. Up to now you’ve selected your level editing tool by clicking through tabs in a Unity window, but we’ve migrated these to a series of icons that overlay the scene view!
The old way above, the new way below...
The yellow icons above represent Sickle's various tools, and will reveal contextual menus as needed
This reduces the amount you need to jump between the scene and the editor window with your eyes, and brings Sickle more into line with the usability standard set for Unity tools. We also just really like making icons! The yellow is a little nod to the color used by our terminal displays.
That’s all for today! Take care everyone, and have a great week.
Robin and the Manzanita Interactive team