FlatBuffersImporter

Google's FlatBuffers (.fbs files) importer for Unity.

FlatBuffers

FlatBuffers is an efficient cross platform serialization library for C++, C#, C, Go, Java, JavaScript, Lobster, Lua, TypeScript, PHP, Python, and Rust. It was originally created at Google for game development and other performance-critical applications.

While the serialisation with FlatBuffers is more explicit and requires more boilerplate, it can be beneficial for higher performance.

Check out the tutorial to know more about how to work with FlatBuffers.

Current bundled version of the compiler and the .Net scripts is 1.10.0

FlatBuffersImporter

This repository simplifies the task of generating C# code from .fbs files, through a ScriptedImporter, by triggering the "flat compiler" with the -n flag to generate C# files.

Usage

Add a .fbs file to your project (along with FlatBuffers) and the importer should automatically generate C# files for you.

The importer will generate a MySchema.cs script from your MySchema.fbs schema files in the same folder where they are located by default.

You can change the folder for the generated script by selecting the .fbs file, and changing the Generated Source Path variable in the inspector. You can choose to reimport the asset, or use the Regenerate code button in the inspector to trigger C# script generation.

Check out the example in the FlatBuffersExample containing a MonsterSchema.fbs file and its corresponding MonsterSchema.cs generated script, along side an example scene of how to use it.

Scripting Define Symbols

You can add the following symbols to Unity to enable certain features within FlatBuffers' ByteBuffer :

• UNSAFE_BYTEBUFFER
  • This will use unsafe code to manipulate the underlying byte array. This can yield a reasonable performance increase.
• BYTEBUFFER_NO_BOUNDS_CHECK
  • This will disable the bounds check asserts to the byte array. This can yield a small performance gain in normal code.
• ENABLE_SPAN_T
  • This will enable reading and writing blocks of memory with a Span<T> instead if just T[]. You can also enable writing directly to shared memory or other types of memory by providing a custom implementation of ByteBufferAllocator.
  • ENABLE_SPAN_T also requires UNSAFE_BYTEBUFFER to be defined
• NATIVE_ARRAY_ALLOCATOR
  • This will enable the NativeArrayAllocator which is a ByteBufferAllocator implementation that uses Unity's NativeArray. When NATIVE_ARRAY_ALLOCATOR is not defined, NativeArrayAllocator falls back to the default ByteArrayAllocator.
  • NATIVE_ARRAY_ALLOCATOR also requires UNSAFE_BYTEBUFFER to be defined.

Contribution

Issues/PRs are welcome.

License

• The FlatBuffers Importer is under MIT.
• The .Net implementation of FlatBuffers and the actual compiler are under Apache 2.0