Level Zero

I am deep in the twisty passages of Unity's custom editor GUI system.
It is pitch black; I am likely to be eaten by something or other.

It is fortunate that I am also learning C# concurrently from another source so that I didn't totally freak out when I started seeing things like

tMap = (tileMap)target;

in tutorials and wikis, I mean, what is that, is something being multiplied here? I guess it's an explicit typecast, casting the object this editor script is acting on into a reference shaped like a custom class? I started to get the picture from the bracketed line above the class definition:

[CustomEditor (typeof(tileMap))]

So it seems Unity, at least on the C# side, is using metadata in a fundamentally similar way to the .Net examples I've seen elsewhere, to extend functionality. I'm right on the dim verge of some related concepts like reflection and generics / templates, but I still honestly don't have a good grasp on what's going on under the hood here, which makes me nervous because when I see new syntax I want to know not only what it is, but why I haven't seen it until now.

Editor scripting is still a kind of menacing mirror-world to me, for example I'm used to

obj = Instantiate(foo) as GameObject;

but apparently that won't work in some contexts, to get the same effect you sometimes need

obj = (GameObject)Instantiate(foo);

and I have no idea why. It's also sort of vexing to be manipulating layout height, width and margin values in a text document like I'm designing a web page in 1992. Of course, this being Unity, such complaints are easily answered by the many plugins available on the asset store for a small fee, and it's a great business model. I'd learn more rolling my own, but I'm already several levels deep in Tool Building Hell, and how much deeper do we want to go exactly? I'm here to make games, or at least I thought I was.

I recently watched this amazing GDC talk by Jordan Mechner about Prince of Persia, detailing the tools workflow he built to create the ahead-of-their-time animations for that game. I won't spoil it here, but the lengths he went to for those effects look like the Labors of Hercules compared to anything one might do to extend a modern game engine or its editor. Still, it's a powerful lesson in how quickly a game's complexity can expand, how quickly a three month schedule can turn into a three year schedule. You have to invest exactly the right amount of time and effort into tool building, to walk that tightrope between burning out doing repetitive, easily automated tasks, and falling down the rabbit hole of attempting to craft the perfect tool for every job; it's impossible. Vigilance must be maintained.

Shout out to Daniel Branicki for the tutorial.

Post Script: A little while after I wrote this I made some sort of change to one of the editor scripts and crashed Unity, a full-on, auto-bug-report-wizard crash. Then whenever I opened Unity it would work OK until I selected the tile map object, then crash violently again. I commented out the lines it seemed to be crashing on, and it stopped crashing .. and responding altogether, to any kind of input. Eventually I was able to restore the editor to life by commenting out the entire OnDrawGizmos function, so now I guess I'll start commenting stuff back in until it starts to crash again. Just another example of Here There be Dragons in extending the editor. You're outside the safety zone, proceed at your own risk.