Grid Framework version 1.5.0 released

Grid Framework version 1.5.0 has been approved by the Asset Store team. This version brings a great new feature for anyone interested in making isometric 2D games: shearing. Shearing allows you to slant a rectangular grid's axes without having to rotate the grid. Up until now the only way to achieve the isometric look was to rotate the grid or the camera in 3D space, but in 2D games the camera has to be perpendicular to the image plane and thus the grid as well. Now all you need to do is just set the shearing of the axes and you're good to go, everything else stays the way it was.

The shearing is stored in a new type called Vector6 that works very much like Unity's own Vector3. The Vector6 class resides in the new GridFramework.Vectors name space to prevent name collision with other custom types or a possible future official Vector6 type from Unity.

the GFBoolVector3 and GFColorVector3 classes have also been moved to that namespace and had their "GF" prefix stripped away. If you used them in your own scripts strip away the prefix and place a using directive at the start of your script, otherwise you have to do nothing.

Here is the full change log:

Introducing shearing for rectangular grids.

• New: Rectangular grids can now store a `shearing` field to distort them.
• New: Custom `Vector6` class for storing the shearing.
• API change: The odd herringbone coordinate system has been renamed to upwards herringbone. The corresponding methods use the `HerringU` pre- or suffix instead of `HerringOdd`; the old methods still work but are marked as depracated.
• API change: The enumeration `GFAngleMode` has been renamed `AngleMode` and moved into the `GridFramework` namespace.
• API change: The enumeration `GridPlane` has been moved into the `GridFramework` namespace. It is no longer part of the `GFGrid` class.
• API change: The class `GFColorVector3` has been renamed `ColorVector3` and moved into the `GridFramework.Vectors` namespace.
• API change: The class `GFBoolVector3` has been renamed `BoolVector3` and moved into the `GridFramework.Vectors` namespace.
• Enhanced: Vectrosity methods without parameters can now pick betweem size and custom range automatically.
• Fixed: Vectrosity methods were broken in previous version.
• Updated the documentation.

Whitelisting subdirectories in Git

After having migrated the development of Grid Framework to Git I wanted to set it up to track only certain sub-directories. I turned out that whitelisting is quite tricky, so here is how I did it for people who might run into the same problem.

We'll use only one .gitignore file and it will be placed in the root of our repository, which is also the root of our project. We can do the usual blacklisting stuff like blacklisting ceretain file types and directories, but the Assets directory is where it gets tricky. Since the directory contains all sorts of other plugins used during development but not worth tracking, we can neither black- nor whitelist the entire directory.

First we'll blacklist all the contents of the Assets directory. Note that this does not blacklist the directory itself, just its contents, but since Git operates on files the effect is the same. The difference is that blacklisting an entire directory prevents us from ever whitelisting any of its contents.

Assets/*

Now we can whitelist a subdirectory and its meta file:

!Assets/Grid\ Framework/
!Assets/Grid\ Framework.meta

Simple enough, but what if we want to whitelist only a specific subdirectory of a subdirectory? The Editor directory contains code from other plugins as well, so we don't want to track the entire thing. In this case we need to repeat the same process as above but one level deeper.

!Assets/Editor/
!Assets/Editor.meta

Assets/Editor/*

!Assets/Editor/Grid\ Framework/
!Assets/Editor/Grid\ Framework.meta

First we whitelist the Editor directory, then we immediately blacklist its contents and whitelist a specific subdirectory. This way none of the other editor extensions will be tracked. We can repeat the same process for the Plugins directory.

!Assets/Plugins/
!Assets/Plugins.meta

Assets/Plugins/*

!Assets/Plugins/Grid\ Framework/
!Assets/Plugins/Grid\ Framework.meta

And yes, you do have to repeat all these steps for every level of subdirectories. You don't have to whitelist subdirectories of already whitelisted directories, so any subdirectory in "Assets/Editor/Grid\ Framework/" is already tracked. Also note the backslash in the path, it is necessay to escape the space character.

UPDATE: Whitelisted the Unity meta files of whitelisted folders as well, just in case. Of course if you are not using Unity you need to figure out if and what meta files you have instead and if they need to be tracked as well.