v1.5 - State Machines, Dependency Injection Improvements & Optimizations

General note about installing updates: it is recommended that you remove the current installed package first before updating to a newer one. Some files may have been deleted or moved, which may cause conflicts or compilation errors. The default location for this package in your Unity project is at Assets/Impossible Odds/Toolkit.

This release brings the State Machine module, a common coding pattern used in a variety of situations. This tool can help you streamline the use of the pattern in your project. Additionally, the Dependency Injection module has been given some useful and nifty additions to speed up managing of your runtime resources. The serialization framework has had a pretty big caching update to reduce memory garbage generation. And finally, a bunch of smaller extension functions have been added to keep your code more concise and readable.

Happy coding!

Added

• Added the State Machines functionality to set up and manage state machines.
• Added Unity package data so that this toolkit can now be included as an embedded project package.
• Added IsNullOrEmpty and IsNullOrWhitespace string extension functions in analogy of their static counterparts.
• Added IsNullOrEmpty collection extension functions to quickly check if a list, array or other type of collection is null or empty.
• Added TryFindIndex list and array extensions to find an index of an element.
• Added additional sorted insertion extension functions for list-structures.
• Added additional logging functions to provide an object as parameter, rather than a string to quickly log the value of an object without having to convert it to string manually.
• Added a serialization processor for the System.Version and System.Guid types so these can be included in serialized data. This processor has been added to all available serialization definitions.
• Added Dependency Injection extension functions to add a component to a game object and inject it immediately.
• Added Dependency Injection extension functions to inject a scene, which will loop over all game objects in the scene.
• Added an optional injection identifier for the Scene and Hierarchy scopes, to inject their scopes to objects requiring their resources to come from specific sources only.
• Added the CompositeDependencyContainer type which is a resource container that is built by combining multiple resource containers. This allows to inject a large set objects in one go instead of going over them per resource container.
• Added an IReadOnlyDependencyContainer interface which allows to only get resources from the container. The IDependencyContainer now inherits from this new interface as well.
• Added a reflection caching framework to optimize and unify the way meta-data is cached and stored. The enum display names, dependency injection, weblink and serialization frameworks now use this caching instead of their internal solutions.

Updated

• Updated the Dependency Injection framework to allow constructor-based injection.
• Updated the Dependency Injection framework to allow static injection. If the object to inject is of type Type, then its static fields and properties will be injected.
• Updated most dependency injection methods to receive a read-only container now if they only require resources to be read from the container.
• Updated the GlobalDependencyScope to have its GlobalScope property be public instead of internal.
• Updated the GlobalDependencyScope to be able to adjust the AutoInjectLoadedScenes at runtime.
• Updated most frameworks to work with concurrency-safe structures. This should make (most of) this toolkit safe to use and run in multi-threaded environments.
• Updated most attribute-related functions to work with the static Attribute functions rather than the member functions defined on the MemberInfo classes to ensure the frameworks work with attribute-related data.
• Updated most internal workings to use arrays instead of the IEnumerable<T> interface to optimise iterating the collections.
• Updated reflection-based method invocation to use a cached parameter list to reduce garbage generation.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where serialization callbacks would get invoked multiple times if overrides of the same method had the callback attribute defined as well.
• Fixed an issue with the Shuffle extension function for lists, where certain placement patterns weren't possible.

Breaking Changes

• The IDependencyScope requires the implementation of an Inject method now. Calling this method on your scope object should inject the objects under its scope with the resources found in its resources container. If you have a custom dependency scope type, you'll have to provide an implementation for this.