DEV Community: Cristian Landaez

5 Reasons to try Godot game engine

Cristian Landaez — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 14:33:00 +0000

If you are a indie dev looking for a new tool to add and never heard about godot before, then this is your lucky day. Today I'm gonna talk you about godot. Godot is a free, open source game engine focus on easy of use and empower the developer. I'm gonna tell you 5 reason why you should try godot today.

Index

Free and open source
Easy to learn
Node system
GDScript
Unity alternative

Free and open source

As I told you before, godot is 100% free and open source. The development is by and for the community and will always be for the community. All that you make with godot is 100% yours, and all the features are free to use without a barriers.

Easy to learn

If you would like to start making games, as a hobby, full time or just being curious, godot is an excellent tool to start with. Godot is an excellent engine to learn the basics and a has an excellent documentation to start with. You can find really good 2D and 3D tutorials. The installation process is quite simple as well, just go to Godot page to download and get the right version for you (standard or mono version). You don't need to install godot, is a executable file, just run it and create a project.

Once you create and open a project you will notice the simple layout and all the tools you have like: a 2D and 3D editor and a code editor for gdscript with auto-complete.

Node system

In godot, every object in the scene is a node. The node system use a composite design pattern that gives us the power to create complex entities in godot. There are multiple types of nodes, form UI to physics and game logic that allow you to tweak your game. This system is really powerful and flexible, and will let you make your vision comes true.

GDScript

One of the most incredible features of Godot is one of his scripting languages. Even though you can use C# in Godot and C++, and are fully supported, GDScript is a language created exclusively for the engine. Being a python-like language makes GDScript easy to learn, write and read. If you already know python jumping to GDScript will be simple.

Unity alternative

For last but no least we have an excellent alternative for Unity engine. If you have seen some of the latest unity news, then you know that the company behind the engine is more interested in profits than making the engine better. As I told you before godot is focus in the community and not in making profits.

The node system in godot is really similar to unity's game components. The support for C# lets use your previous knowledge in godot and will alow you a really easy transition to Godot.

Conclusion

If you want to see some ganes made in godot click here. As you can see Godot is a great tool for create 2D and 3D games. I hope that with this post it has helped you find a great tool to learn and develop games. If you have another reason to why learn Godot, tell me in the comment section. See you soon and good luck making games.

Debugging .NET in VSCode

Cristian Landaez — Sat, 12 Mar 2022 15:06:55 +0000

Hello and welcome! Today, I'm gonna show you how to use the vscode debugger and how to configure it for all your needs. I hope this article results useful to you and let's go!

Creating the project
Debug your first project
- Creating debugger files
- Adding breakpoints
- Running the debugger
- Playing with the Debugger
Debugging Multiple Projects
- Setting Up More Projects
- Tasks.json
- Add Debug Configuration
Conclusions

Creating the project

First, We need to create a folder called Debugger to save all in there. This is needed to keep the .vscode folder, that holds the debugger files, and have everything in an unique folder.

mkdir Debugger
cd Debugger

Then, create a net6.0 console project which we will use to see the debugger in action and open vscode.

dotnet new console -n Proj1
code .

Debug your first project.

After opening vscode you should see this in Program.cs file.

// See https://aka.ms/new-console-template for more information
Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");

If not so, the code is ok too. This is just the template for console projects in net6.0, but the debugger works fine with all version of .NET.

Creating debugger files

If you haven't installed the extension for C# yet, you can go to the extension bar, search for C# and install the extension.

If you already have the extension you should see this message after omnisharp finish loading.

And if you press Yes the vscode will create the tasks.json and launch.json files to run the debugger.

If you don't see the window you can press Ctrl+shift+p to open the command palette and write .NET: Generate Assests for Build and Debug and execute the command.

Go to the debugger bar and press create a launch.json file

and select your project target framework. In this case .NET 5+ and .NET Core.

Adding breakpoints

A breakpoint is a flag that you set in a line of code to stop the program before the line is executed.

So, go to Program.cs file and add the following code below the hello world.

for (int i = 1; i < 6; i++)
    Console.WriteLine(i);

Console.WriteLine("Bye, World!");

then go to the line below the for-loop and add a breakpoint by pressing f9.

A red point will show at the left of your editor like this.

If you press Ctrl+f5 the program will build and execute without the debugger and print the followed in the debug console.

Hello, World!
1
2
3
4
5
Bye, World!

Running the Debugger

If you press f5 the project will be build and after that the debugger will be launch. Then the Debug console will appear. In this console you can also change the variables values. Also will display the debugger bar showing all variables, the call stacks and breakpoints.

And the code will stop at the breakpoint.

Playing with the debugger

You will see a highlighted yellow line that show the next line of code to be executed.

You also see this bar

From left to right, the buttons have this functions:

Continuef5: Continues the execution until the next breakpoint.
Step Overf10: Execute just the next line to be executed.
Step Intof11: jump into the function in the highlighted yellow line.
Step OutShift+f11: jump out of the function to the last stack call.
RestartCtrl+Shift+f5: Restart the the building and re launch the debugger.
StopShift+f5: Stop the program.

The debug console

Also with the debug console you can change the value of the variables.

If you write the following expression in the debug console RELP.

i = -3

You will see in the debugger bar that the variable "i" changes his value from 0 to -3. If you finish executing all the program the final output should be the next.

Hello, World!
-3
-2
-1
0
1
2
3
4
5
Bye, World!

Debugging Multiple Projects

If you ever have using Visual Studio, and had more than one project, you have notice the ease of changing the debugger configuration out of the box. In vscode we need to config the debugger to have something similar.

Setting Up More Projects

Let's create another console project, a solution file and add the projects to the solution with the following lines.

dotnet new console -n Proj2
dotnet new sln
dotnet sln add **/*proj

Tasks.json

Now, we need to modify the tasks.json file, specifically, the build task.
The tasks.json file is used to automate scripts execution and process execution like build, test and publish. We need change the build task so it builds all the solution and not just the Proj1.csproj.

So open the vscode/tasks.json file and you should see this tasks in the file.

{
    "label": "build",
    "command": "dotnet",
    "type": "process",
    "args": [
        "build",
        "${workspaceFolder}/Proj1/Proj1.csproj",
        "/property:GenerateFullPaths=true",
        "/consoleloggerparameters:NoSummary"
    ],
    "problemMatcher": "$msCompile"
},

And just remove the Proj1.csproj direction from the task, like this.

{
    "label": "build",
    "command": "dotnet",
    "type": "process",
    "args": [
        "build",
        "${workspaceFolder}",
        "/property:GenerateFullPaths=true",
        "/consoleloggerparameters:NoSummary"
    ],
    "problemMatcher": "$msCompile"
},

Now vscode builds all the solution and you don't need to build every projects manually.

Add Debug Configuration

Now, you need to add a new configuration to launch.json. Just go to the debug bar and select Add Configuration... like this.

And will asks you to select what type of configuration you want

After you select the configuration change the name of the configuration and the program argument to "${workspaceFolder}//bin/Debug//.dll", like this.

{
    "name": "Proj2(Debug)",
    "type": "coreclr",
    "request": "launch",
    "preLaunchTask": "build",
    "program": "${workspaceFolder}/Proj2/bin/Debug/net6.0/Proj2.dll",
    "args": [],
    "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}",
    "stopAtEntry": false,
    "console": "internalConsole"
},

If you inspected the file for your self you already have notice another arguments like args, to add arguments when the debugger launch; stopAtEntry, if you want to stop at the first line of code of the program and console, to select what console you can use to debug.

And then you can see the configuration added to the debug bar and changed as you wish.

Conclusions

Well, we learn in this article how to use the debugger and configure by your self for c#. I hope this article helps you with your developer journey.

Thank you for read my article and see you soon!!!

VsCode extensions for .NET

Cristian Landaez — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 03:29:21 +0000

So you start develop in .Net. Most of courses and tutorial told you to install Visual Studio 2019/2022 but, if you are like me, your computer is really crappy. Luckily for us we don't need Visual Studio to work with .Net.

This works not only in windows, limitation that it does has visual studio, but with linux and macos to.

In this tutotial I'll show you some extensions to work with .net and hope it suits your needs.

Install .Net
Install vscode
C# Extensions
General .Net Extensions
General VsCode extensions

.NET 6

.Net is the develop platform to build applications and with .net 6 we can develop tons of differents applications.

As you can see we can develop from desktop to mobile. Sadly we can't make xamarin applications without of Visual Studio, but we can make anything else.

You can download .net 6 here to windows, macos X64, macos arm and linux following the instructions.

VScode

You first need to download vscode here.

Next we will install the extensions for vscode

C# Development

We need a couple of extension to have a good experience with c#.

C#

This extension gives you great tools to edit c#:

Debugger.
Syntax Highlighting.
IntelliSense.
Go to Definition.
Find All References.

C# XML Documentation Comments

You can document your code for your editor/ide with xml, but recall all the tags and possibles attributes is really painful.
So, thanks to this extension we just need to code /// and all tags will be automatically generated.

Roslynator

This is really powerful. This extension gives you analyzers, refactors and fixes for you c# code in one click.

C# Extensions

This is absolutely great! Brings the ease of create classes, interfaces and more without the need of custom snippets.

C# Namespace Autocompletion

Helps you to complete an appropriated namespace for your code.

General .Net

This extension are not exclusive for C#, they work for all .net languages.

.NET Core Add Reference

It is that simple. Adds a project reference to another with just two clicks.

MSBuild project tools

This tool is cool to inspect your .[cs|fs|vb]proj file, also an autocomplete for <packageReference> elements.

.NET Core Snippet Pack

We don't have class templates like in visual studio, we need to write every piece of code, but, with this extension, we can save a lot of time with the snippets for all kinds of .net projects.

.NET Core Tools

If you don't like the console you will love this.
It is a simple extension, builds, runs and test your projects with a click in the project file. So you don't need to write every time the dotnet run command.

.NET Core Test Explorer

Useful if you do unit test. With a test explorer this extension helps you to run and debug all test you have in your project.

NuGet Gallery Extension

The easiest way to install a nuget package, just search the package and install it in all the projects you want. Much more easy than going to nuget.org and copy the command every time.

NuGet Package Manager GUI

This is like the last one but with a nice GUI, package updater and a list of your dependencies.

General VsCode

Extensions for general purpose that can improve you workflow.

Better Comments

An incredible way to highlight your comments and make them more useful.

gitignore

Adds different templates to your .gitignore file depending of what technology you are using.

GitLens

Improve your vscode experience with git in 100%. Makes so much easier to work with git.

Path Intellisense

Really useful when you have a long directory distribution in your project and don't wanna see every 5 seconds your file in the file explorer.

Documents

With this you can read almost any document directly in vscode.

Markdown

Markdown helper to write good markdown files.

Vim

And for the great finale vim. It is one of my favorite extension and an incredible tool to speed up your coding. If you don't know vim give it a change and learn it!

These are some extension that I use and are really useful for me. Maybe this post is a little bit long but i hope useful for you. This list can change in the future to add or remove an extension so i'll try to keep it update.

Thanks for your time! Bye!