Alex Darby // darbotron 🛹

@darbotron.bsky.social

1279 Followers 642 Following

Programmer & Designer. Human, husband, parent, skateboarder. Gamedev since '96. Company founder. BAFTA member & winner. GameDevHeroes Programming Hero 2019. Co-creator DJ Hero. #UKGI Cthulhu fhtagn ;,; www.darbotron.com www.linkedin.com/in/darbotron

A digitally altered black and white photo which looks very like someone I know who works for the company where the game it is from is made.

C#/Unity: autocomplete inserts using directives which break code compilation

In this bug I am referring to an issue which occurs almost hourly in Unity projects, and which causes constant friction in team projects since people are frequently breaking builds as a result of checking in code in which this issue has occurred.

Note that this happens in C# code when using Unity, but I see no reason why the same issues wouldn't happen in C and C++ if autocomplete inserts #include directives in those languages.

The Issue

In any Unity project, the game code assembly can see the Editor assembly when the game is being run in the Editor.

This means that when you absent-mindedly / accidentally accept an autocompletion from Rider in Unity C# gameplay code there is a good chance that it will have added a using directive for a namespace or type from the Unity Editor assembly.

However, for obvious reasons, the Editor assembly is excluded when making a "standalone" build of the game which runs outside the Unity Editor; and this means any code with a using directive which includes a namespace or type from the Editor assembly will fail to compile.

Why it is a Massive PITA

This situation is exacerbated by the fact that in Unty games it is fairly common to need special case "when playing the game in the editor" behaviour in gameplay code - and this is typically achieved by simply wrapping the editor specific code with #if (UNITY_EDITOR) .... #endif

When Rider autocompletes code within conditionally compiled code it silently inserts the using directive at the top, which will work fine when compiling in the Editor, but will break the build on the build machine when committed.

Nendodroid "Hideo Kojima" super deformed action figure.

The address side of the Cthulhugram containing my 2026 membership stamp

the left arm with a magnetised wrist

3 Necron Skorpekh Destroyers: undercoated black, then applied 3 layer zenithal metallic. They look cool af.

A necron warrior, black all over, silver shoulders, & green glow

a blue Santa Cruz Screaming Hand sticker (disembodied zombie hand with a screaming mouth in the palm)

LEGO Game Boy - part built: at step 80 in the instructions

"Noseybonk" from the 80s UK kid's TV show Jigsaw

Brick built LEGO space man (blue)

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/162557-it-comes-from-a-very-ancient-democracy-you-see-you

If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would have something which didn't exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar.

Text from photo: It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.
What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

Border Collie looking straight at camera in a pleading way.

Image: "Godot's GitHub has increasingly many pull requests generated by LLMs and it's a MASSIVE time waster for reviewers – especially if people don't disclose it. Changes often make no sense, descriptions are extremely verbose, users don't understand their own changes… It's a total shitshow. #godotengine"

a grey & white collie splooting in a sphinx-like manner (with badly drawn Tuten Khamun head dress added)

Problem: Unity animation window, jsut switched from 'dopesheet' to 'curves' - zoom level is entirely unhelpful.

Loading screen image of Deflektor, a 1987 puzzle game on the ZX Spectrum

a tub of gelato with the label "banana caramel" I added the letters "on" to the end badly by hand in a paint package so it now says "banana caramelon"

Samus Aran stands in Sci-Fi chamber with mist.
The caption says PSYCHIC SPIDER BALL ACQUIRED

Samus Aran standing with caption: "PSYCHIC BOOST BALL ACQUIRED"

Screen shot of Bluesky post: "I believe every computer game developer should be forced at gunpoint to make a Linux version of their games.

My operating system isn't a Windows compatibility layer.

Every person who says, oh just run it with wine should go at the very least to jail or maybe
something worse."

yoda

cursive English handwritten 'minimum' - looks like a child's drawing of the sea...

A WH40K termagant from the leviathan sculpt

three border collies all trying to get their ears scratched: from left to right Wren, Penny, Ghost.

a smiley black and white border collie reluctantly wearing an antler headband whilst clutched in the lap of someone wearing a Santa suit.

egodox moonlanderf split ergonomic keyboard with 2 Xbox controllers in between the keyboard halves (can you tell I make videogames)

Movie promo poster for Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

movie poster of Labyrinth starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connolly, & a billion puppets

quote from the article:
When Salesforce said back in 2024 that its “Einstein Trust Layer” and AI would be “transformational for jobs,” the media dutifully wrote it down and published it without a second thought. It fully trusted Marc Benioff when he said that Agentforce agents would replace human workers, and then again when he said that AI agents are doing “30% to 50% of all the work in Salesforce itself,” even though that’s an unproven and nakedly ridiculous statement

Newage Hawk - micro scale 10cm interpretation of Autobot Ironhide with superb articulation.

Quote from Tony Blair: "If we used the potential of facial recognition, data and DNA, we would cut crime rates by not small but game-changing margins."
Article response: "Facial recognition might make law enforcement slightly easier, but tying it to digital ID could make dissent near-impossible. George Orwell wrote a novel explaining why this sort of thing is a terrible idea, and it was not supposed to be an instruction manual."

Hasbro Studio Series 86 Jazz (still in the box 😅)

Newage Toys Manero (Jazz) & Harry (Prowl) next to a LEGO Spider-Man minifig for scale