Screen shot of my galaxy generator in action
Screen shot of my galaxy generator in action

I’ve been developing stuff with Unity in my spare time for something like eight years (I started at around v1.5). I was initially drawn in by its alleged Javascript support. Indeed, I like Unityscript so much, I defended it vocally against charges that using C# is better, and wrote this article to help others avoid some of my early stumbles. I also contributed significant improvements to JSONParse — although the fact that you need a JSON module for Unityscript tells you something about just how unlike Javascript it really is.

I’m a pretty hardcore Javascript coder these days. I’ve learned several frameworks, written ad unit code that runs pretty much flawlessly on billions of computers every day (or used to — I don’t know what’s going on with my former employers), created a simple framework from scratch, helped develop a second framework from scratch (sorry, can’t link to it yet), built services using node.js and phantom.js, built workflow automation tools in javascript for Adobe Creative Suite and Cheetah 3D, and even written a desktop application with node-webkit.

The problem with Unityscript is that it’s not really Javascript, and the more I use it, the more the differences irk me.

Anyway, one evening in 2012 I wrote a procedural galaxy generator using barebones Javascript. When I say barebones, I mean that I didn’t use any third-party libraries (I’d had a conversation with my esteemed colleague Josiah Ulfers about the awfulness of jQuery’s iterators some time earlier and so I went off on a tangent and implemented my own iteration library for fun that same evening).

Now, this isn’t about the content or knowledge that goes into the star system generator itself. It’s basic physics and astrophysics, a bit of googling for things like the mathematics of log spirals, and finding Knuth’s algorithm for generating gaussian random distributions. Bear in mind that some of this stuff I know by heart, some of it I had googled in an idle moment some time earlier, and some of it I simply looked up on the spot. I’m talking about the time it takes to turn an algorithm into working code.

So the benchmark is: coding the whole thing, from scratch, in one long evening, using Javascript.

Now, the time it took to port it into Unityscript — NaN. Abandoned after two evenings.

I’m about halfway through porting this stuff to C# (in Unity), and so far I’ve devoted part of an afternoon and part of an evening. Now bear in mind that with C# I am using the Mono project’s buggy auto-completing editor, which is probably a slight productivity win versus using a solid text editor with no autocomplete for Javascript (and Unityscript). Also note that I am far from fluent as a C# programmer.

So far here are my impressions of C# versus Javascript.

C#’s data structures and types are a huge pain. Consider this method in my PNRG class (which wraps a MersenneTwister implementation I found somewhere in a far more convenient API):

// return a value in [min,max]
public float RealRange( double min, double max ){
    return (float)(mt.genrand_real1 () * (max - min) + min);
}

I need to cast the double (that results from mt.genrand_real1 ()). What I’d really like to do is pick a floating point format and just use it everywhere, but it’s impossible. Some things talk floats, others talk double, and of course there are uints and ints, which must also be cast to and fro. Now I’m sure there are bugs caused by, for example, passing signed integers into code that expects unsigned, but seriously. It doesn’t help that the Mono compiler generates cryptic error messages (not even telling you, for example, what it is that’s not the right type).

How about some simple data declarations:

Javascript:

var stellarTypes = {
    "O": {
        luminosity: 5E+5,
        color = 'rgb(192,128,255)',
        planets = [0,3]
    },
    ...
};

C#:

public static Dictionary<string, StellarType> stellarTypes = new Dictionary<string, StellarType> {
    {"O", new StellarType(){
        luminosity = 50000F,
        color = new Color(0.75F,0.5F,1.0F),
        minPlanets = 0, 
        maxPlanets = 3
    }},
    ...
};

Off-topic, here’s a handy mnemonic — Oh Be A Fine Girl Kiss Me (Right Now Smack). Although I think that R and N are now referred to as C-R and C-N and have been joined by C-H and C-J so we probably need a replacement.

Note that the C# version requires the StellarType class to be defined appropriately (I could have simply used a dictionary of dictionaries or something, but the declaration gets uglier fast, and it’s pretty damn ugly as it is. I also need use the System.Collections.Generic namespace (that took me a while to figure out — I thought that by using System.Collections I would get System.Collections.Generic for free).

Now I don’t want to pile on C#. I actually like it a lot as a language (although I prefer Objective-C so far). It’s a shame it doesn’t have some obvious syntax sugar (e.g. public static auto or something to avoid typing the same damn type twice) and that its literal notation is so damn ugly.

Another especially annoying declaration pattern is public int foo { get; private set; } — note the lack of terminal semicolon, and the fact that it’s public/private. And note that this should probably be the single most common declaration pattern in C#, so it really should be the easiest one to write. Why not public int foo { get; }? (You shouldn’t need set at all — you have direct internal access to the member.)

I’m also a tad puzzled as to why I can’t declare static variables inside methods (I thought I might be doing it wrong, but this explanation argues it’s a design choice — but I don’t see how a static method variable would or should be different from an instance variable, only scoped to the method. So, instead I’m using private member variables which need to be carefully commented. How is this better?

So in a nutshell, I need to port the following code from Javascript to C#:

  • astrophysics.js — done
  • badwords.js — done; simple code to identify randomly generated names containing bad words and eliminate them
  • iter.js — C# has pretty good built-in iterators (and I don’t need most of the iterators I wrote) so I can likely skip this
  • mersenne_twister — done; replaced this with a different MT implementation in C#; tests written
  • planet.js — I’ve refactored part of this into the Astrophysics module; the rest will be in the Star System generator
  • pnrg.js — done; tests written; actually works better and simpler in C# than Javascript (aside from an hour spent banging my head against weird casting issues)
  • star.js — this is the galaxy generator (it’s actually quite simple) — it basically produces a random collection of stars offset from a log spiral using a gaussian distribution.
  • utils.js — random stuff like a string capitalizer, roman numeral generator, and object-to-HTML renderer; will probably go into Astrophysics or be skipped

Once I’ve gotten the darn thing working, I’ll package up a web demo. (When Unity 5 Pro ships I should be able to put up a pure HTML version, which will bring us full circle.) Eventually it will serve as the content foundation for Project Weasel and possibly a new version of Manta.