Ink Scripted Importer

[SHiLLySiT]

This aims to implement #53, which IMO, has some huge benefits:

1. There is no longer separate source .INK files and compiled .JSON files that can get out of sync. Which means designers don't need to remember commit both .INK and JSON files, which can happen if they're testing/writing outside Unity with Inky.
2. No need to deal with managing a ink file compilation queue, and fighting with the Editor. Ink files are compiled when imported, either when added or changed.
3. You can expose InkFile references instead of generic TextAsset references in game code.
4. This codebase becomes significantly less complex, and less prone to weird errors that have to deal with compiling assets outside of Unity's normal import process.

This PR is currently in a proof of concept stage: it hasn't been fully tested, but loading and running ink files at runtime and in the Editor is working.

The original implementation was written before Unity supported custom scripted importers, so many of the systems are now obsolete. Since this is a pretty big change, I wanted to open a PR to get an initial review to get some initial thoughts from the maintainers.

Interested in all feedback, but the question at the top of my mind: Do we need to expose includes and master files in the editor? While Ink at a language level still has these concepts, I'm not sure how important it is to expose these in Unity if its no longer important for compilation?

[tomkail]

Oh wow thanks for looking into this! I'll take a look this week if I find time. At a glance it looks lovely (so much less code!!)
I've pinged the Unity dev community on Discord (https://discord.gg/inkle) to take a look too, since this is a big change and I'd like as many devs as possible to confirm that it doesn't affect them negatively in any way.

[SHiLLySiT]

Totally! I see your message in #ink-unity-integration-dev. I'll keep watch for questions/comments there too. Thanks!

[SHiLLySiT]

@tomkail Okay I'm moving this out of draft as I've cleaned up the known things I needed to do, but I suspect there may be things I've missed since this was such a huge change. Feel free to tag me on any changes you want after doing a review. I'll loop back when I have the time 🤘

[tomkail]

Amazing! Annoyingly nobody has checked this out. How about we stick it on a beta branch and publish it there? Maybe that’ll encourage people.

…

On Mon, Oct 7, 2024 at 00:49 Alex Larioza ***@***.***> wrote: @tomkail <https://github.com/tomkail> Okay I'm moving this out of draft as I've cleaned up the known things I needed to do, but I suspect there may be things I've missed since this was such a huge change. Feel free to tag me on any changes you want after doing a review. I'll loop back when I have the time 🤘 — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#205 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAJR3UED36NFMMKTA7MLXJDZ2HD67AVCNFSM6AAAAABNPMJ5EWVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDGOJVGY2TKOJTGM> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[SHiLLySiT]

Sounds good to me! I'd rather give more people more time to test it out before its merged into main 😅

I don't appear to have the option to change the base branch to a new (non-existing) branch tho. If you make a beta branch I can update the PR!

[SHiLLySiT]

I forgot to update the docs, so I snuck another commit in 👍