About¶

SwissArmyLib is an attempt to create a collection of useful utilities with a focus on being performant. It is primarily intended for Unity projects, but feel free to rip parts out and use them for whatever you want.

A very important part in the design decisions of this library was to keep the garbage generation low. This means you will probably frown a little upon the use of interfaces for callbacks, instead of just using delicious delegates. It also means using the trusty oldfor loops for iterating through collections where possible.

There’s a lot of libraries with some of the same features, but they’re often walled off behind a restrictive or ambiguous license.This project is under the very permissive MIT license and we honestly do not care what you use it for.

Features¶

• Events
  • Supports both interface and delegate listeners
  • Can be prioritized to control call order
  • Check outGlobalEvents if you need.. well.. global events.
• Timers
  • Supports both scaled and unscaled time
  • Optional arbitrary args to pass in
  • Also uses interfaces for callbacks to avoid garbage
• Coroutines
  • More performant alternative to Unity’s coroutines with a very similar API.
• Automata
  • Finite State Machine
  • Pushdown Automaton
• Pooling
  • Support for both arbitrary classes and GameObjects
  • IPoolable interface for callbacks
    • PoolableGroup component in case multiple IPoolable components needs to be notified
  • Timed despawns
• Service Locator
  • An implementation of the Service Locator pattern
  • Aware of MonoBehaviours and how to work with them
  • Supports scene-specific resolvers
  • Supports both singletons and short-lived objects
    • Singletons can be lazy loaded
• Managed Update Loop
  • An update loop maintained in managed space to avoid theoverhead of Native C++ –> Managed C#
  • Useful for non-MonoBehaviours that needs to be part of the update loop
  • OptionalManagedUpdateBehaviour class for easy usage
• Spatial Partitioning
  • GC-friendly implementations of common space-partitioning systems
• Resource Pool
  • Generic and flexible resource pool (health, mana, energy etc.)
• Gravity
  • Flexible gravitational system
  • Useful for planet gravity, black holes, magnets and all that sort of stuff.
• Misc
  • BetterTime
    • A wrapper for Unity’s static Time class that caches the values per frame to avoid the marshal overhead.
    • About 4x faster than using the Time class directly, but we’re talking miniscule differences here.
  • Shake
    • Useful for creating proper screen shake
  • Some collection types
  • Some useful attributes
    • ExecutionOrder
      • Sets a default (or forces) an execution order for a MonoBehaviour
    • ReadOnly
      • Makes fields uninteractable in the inspector
  • A few other tiny utilities