Questions about JSON Tutorial

[Cat_Hill]

Assuming we skip the “saving asset pack” part of the tutorial and jump ahead to the “Saving System”:

1. Is the JSON tutorial written with the expectation that we first complete the Saving System section and then convert to JSON? The warning page seems to suggest one should skip the sections but the tutorial page seems to suggest one needs to complete the sections first. Perhaps even complete the course first??

2. I noticed a broken link in the JSON tutorial here in the “getting started” section. I don’t think it matters for the RPG course.

You may want to start by learning how the Saving System works. This is covered in depth in the Core Combat Course, both with a “Here’s an asset Pack” style approach and a “Let’s build this from the ground up approach”. If you’re starting in one of our other courses, you should review How The Saving System Works

3. Is an equivalent way of editing the manifest file to go into unity package manager and add a package by name? When I attempted to do that here is what I got — note the version is different but adding by name does seem to have the effect of editing the manifest file. Do we need to overrride the manifest to use version 2.0.0?

[Brian_Trotter]

That’s another edit I’ll need to make. Use the existing version of NewtonSoft Json included in the Unity Package Manager. When the tutorial was first written, this version was hidden from view without using Add By Name, unless you were using some very specific packages (that weren’t used in the RPG project). Now a number of other modules use Newtonsoft, and it’s installed by default in newer installations.

I’m not sure what happened to the How the Saving System Works link. How odd.

My recommendation is to go through the Asset Pack version of the Saving System in the RPG course at the very least. While we don’t recommend using it going forward, it gives a good overview of just how the system integrates within the RPG course. After that, you can switch to the Json version.

It’s actually ok to go through the course using the Asset Pack version and then convert the whole thing when you’re done. What’s no ok (or at the very least ill advised) is to distribute the game using the BinaryFormatter version of the system.

As a reference, converting an existing repo of the final course project to the Json system following the tutorial takes me about 20 minutes (because I start with the slight advantage of having done so 20 or so times), and should take a student experienced with the course an hour or two (or if you’re really good at copy/paste, as little as 20 minutes!)