Unity and NordVPN

Three technical things...

Switching to Cascadia Code Font

Microsoft has released a new open-source programming font called Cascadia Code that features ligatures which can be enabled in most IDEs. This changes a sequence of characters to the proper symbols.

Image from: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/cascadia-code/

Ahh. At last, I found something that I prefer over Lucida Console.

Getting Unity to work with a VPN

Typically I would work with Unity with NordVPN disconnected. This VPN client and some others are not compatible. For this new project I wanted a proper fix. So, after a bit of searching I switched to using the OpenVPN client with a few steps to work on startup (link). And, changed the network connection DNS to 1.1.1.1 (link).

Now, I can stay connected to a Nord server all the time with this client.

Reducing the size of the Git depot

Plus, I cleaned up the Git repository of the new project by specifying more ignore folders to prevent it from growing in size too quickly.

These art files for the backgrounds already are 30mb, so any commit with minor changes naively will store both versions, and, an additional copy because I have a remote depot on my Dropbox where I push changes daily. These files and licensed Unity packages will be kept separate from the depot, still backed up automatically on my Dropbox folder.

In other words, the depot is much smaller, and everything continues to be backed up daily anyways.

The code is still the most important. These are tiny but critical files. I still use a batch file to copy and store copies of all the code to Dropbox and Google Drive, in addition to the two Git repositories, in case somehow files get obliterated or the depots become corrupt. Unlikely, but never know.

I neglected to use ignore folders for Gem Heroes. The depot is now 30gb. A lot of this is regenerated content for specific platforms. At least for the recent iOS build, I just switched the platform (which takes half an hour) and built the Xcode project to finish on a rented Mac in the cloud. I reset these changes because saving any of this is unnecessary, once I have the Xcode project.