Community Addons Help

[timid wadi]

Hello, I'm a user of Visual Scripting for about two years and I just discovered the Community Addons by Reality.Stop(). It's a fantastic addition to VS but I don't find any real documentation on it besides the release note section on github

The thing is, I don't really understand how to use Delegates (Create Action, Bind Action / Func...), I feel like it's a very useful functionality, could someone explain it to me ?

[heady cargo]

Hi, sorry about that I will see what I can do about documentation when I update it.

About the delegates.

First to create a Delegate what you need to do is in the Project tab(the tab with your files and folders) right click on a empty space then go to
Create > VisualScripting > Community > Code > Delegate now in the inspector you can chose the type for the delegate your want

then you can open the C# Preview which is in Windows > Community Addons > C# Preview then you can press compile this will create the delegate for you. if you don't see any code in the preview make sure to click on the Delegate asset once the window is opened.
And if its not compiling then Open the Utility Window and press compile all. which should be in Windows > Community Addons > Utility Window if not then right click on a empty spot in a graph and the option should appear there to open the Utility Window if i am not mistaken.

Now you can go to a graph and Add a Create Action or Create Func like in the screenshot depending on the type you chose in the inspector when creating the delegate. Click on the Node and in the Graph Inspector you can set the type of the action there.

Here is the graph explaining each unit

[heady cargo]

So if you do not know what Delegates are at all what this is basically allowing you to do in simple terms is letting your store the Code of the Create Delegate unit to be used later/somewhere else

[timid wadi]

Ok, so your are one oh the contributors ? Thanks a lot for the explanation, I had never used Delegates in C# before, now I understand better.

I have an other question about community addons. Some features aren't working properly, like the "Input/Output Visible" of the reroute nodes Maybe you already know about it ?

[heady cargo]

Yeah unfortunately that feature was causing a lot of problems with the connections so i had to disable it and since I could not figure out a way to properly implement it since, I am going to have to remove that from the addons. I might experiment with other ways to try and achieve this in the future. but until then I am going to remove it

[timid wadi]

Okay, I see.
I'll keep posting here if I have any more questions as I'm still learning about the add-on.
Thank you for maintaining it alive, it's so useful ! 👍

[heady cargo]

You're welcome, you can @ me if you need anything

[timid wadi]

Hi @heady cargo
I've upgraded my Unity from 6.0 to 6.2 and I got this error, do you know how I can solve it ?

[heady cargo]

Hi yeah just give me a sec

[heady cargo]

Try and recompile the Action and see if that fixes it. If not let me know

[heady cargo]

Or did this happen after the Script Compiled?

[timid wadi]

Okay, I recompiled and the error is gone, but I may have made a mistake. 😬
Before recompiling, I opened a graph that contained the Delegate Action, but now the graph is empty.

[heady cargo]

That might be a problem on Visual scripting's side, There is a lot of a cases were people have complained about this where the graph just disappears. I am not sure what causes this which is why its good to make regular backups

[timid wadi]

Ok, hopefully I did. Thank you for the help, I should have thought about recompiling. In fact, something strange happened when I tried to recompile: the window with the recompile button disappeared and I can't find it anymore. Did you change its location in the new version ?

[heady cargo]

The Utility window?

This was moved to the graph you can right click on a empty space and press utility window to open it but you cannot dock it any more, but the compile buttons were also added here at the top of Unity to make it easy to access

[timid wadi]

Okay, thank you 👍

[heady cargo]

Like in this picture i also moved the to embed and to macro here for easier access since it would be annoying to need to open the window everytime you want to use it, but all the options will still be in the window as well

[heady cargo]

You're welcome

[timid wadi]

Okay, I'm back on this.
It seems I cannot recover my graphs. All graphs that contained a Create Action or Invoke Action are empty and VS can't serialize them. The files still contain data, but in the editor they are empty and at runtime they do not work. 😕
And it comes with this error.

I don't know if you have any idea how I could recover my graphs ?

[heady cargo]

Mmm i see, I can give you the updated script for the delegate node you can try and replace it and see if that helps

[heady cargo]

If you imported the asset with the Github link in the package manger then in the assets tab search for Delegate node select packages then open the script and paste this code in that script

[timid wadi]

Nothing seems to have changed. 😕

[heady cargo]

can you send me the graph file?

[heady cargo]

I just want to see something

[timid wadi]

Here are the 3 graphs

[heady cargo]

what is the name of the compiled delegate can you go to the generated script in Assets/Unity.VisualScripting.Community.Generated/Scripts/Delegates then tell me the name of the script?

[heady cargo]

yeah it seems like the name of the delegate changed so it could not find the same compiled delegate for example its supposed to compile as _GenericAction but the one in the graph is as Generic_Action so it caused a error. Once i edited these graph files to change the names it worked again

[heady cargo]

You can update the the addons since I pushed a change now, Then compile the delegate again then remimport these assets to your project and it should work fine

[timid wadi]

Yeah it worked, thanks a lot, I've saved my graphs ! 🥳

In the future, do I need to recompile all my delegates when I update Unity or community add-ons to prevent this from happening again ?

Again, thank you for your time and your patience !

[heady cargo]

You're welcome, No you should not need to compile it if you update it, I think i accidentally changed the compile code which caused the error so I wont need to change it I don't think

[timid wadi]

Hello @heady cargo
I'm dealing a new issue which is that I can't build my project.
By creating a blank project, I was able to identify that the problem came from the delegates. As soon as I create a Delegate Asset and compile it, the build fails.
If you have time, could you look into it ?

[heady cargo]

Hello are you able to send the errors to me?

[heady cargo]

what delegate type did you use In the delegate asset

[timid wadi]

Action
I also tried with a Unity Action

[heady cargo]

is there any units you used?

[timid wadi]

no

[heady cargo]

Are you sure it only happens after compiling it or does it happen just after you add a Delegate asset to the project?

[timid wadi]

I didn't try and I can't test it because the error persists even though I delete the Delegate asset.

[heady cargo]

Ahh found the culprit, Thanks for finding this bug I will update the Github in a moment.

[heady cargo]

Ok you should be able to update it now

[timid wadi]

Great, it works
thank you for the quick fix.

[heady cargo]

You're welcome!

[heady cargo]

Oh yes by the way about your initial message you were looking for documentation, I've been trying to finish the Wiki page on the Github, for better documentation so if you did not see it you can go here https://github.com/RealityStop/Bolt.Addons.Community/wiki I am still working on it but should have most info already on it