Using the Puck API

Now that we have our development environment set up, we can start adding dependency libraries to our project in order to interact with the Puck API.

1. Let's create a new libs folder within our project in which we will be placing our libraries.

   
2. Now we need to navigate to the directory where Puck is installed. This can be quickly done via Steam's Browse local files.

   
3. Open the Puck_Data folder and within it, open the Managed folder as well. The absolute path where the game's libraries are stores will look as follows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Puck\Puck_Data\Managed.

   
4. Copy all of the contents from the Managed folder to your project's libs folder.

   
5. In order for our project to be aware of the added libraries, let's also add the the following to our MyPuckMod.csproj file:

   <ItemGroup>
     <Libs Include="libs\*.dll" Exclude="libs\System.*.dll" />
   
     <Reference Include="@(Libs)">
       <HintPath>%(Libs.FullPath)</HintPath>
       <Private>false</Private>
     </Reference>
   </ItemGroup>

   This ItemGroup gathers all .dll files in our libs folder and references them in our project. The Private flag ensures the referenced libraries are not included in our final build. The resulting MyPuckMod.csproj should now look as follows:

   <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">
   
     <PropertyGroup>
       <TargetFramework>net4.8</TargetFramework>
     </PropertyGroup>
   
     <ItemGroup>
       <Libs Include="libs\*.dll" Exclude="libs\System.*.dll" />
   
       <Reference Include="@(Libs)">
         <HintPath>%(Libs.FullPath)</HintPath>
         <Private>false</Private>
       </Reference>
     </ItemGroup>
   
   </Project>

6. Let's update our Class1.cs file to make use of the IPuckMod interface:

   using UnityEngine;
   
   namespace MyPuckMod {
       public class Class1 : IPuckMod
       {
           public bool OnEnable()
           {
               Debug.Log("Hello world from MyPuckMod!");
               return true;
           }
   
           public bool OnDisable()
           {
               return true;
           }
       }
   }

   The IPuckMod interface is what Puck looks for when loading your .dll. Make sure your mod also provides an OnEnable and OnDisable functions. Puck will call those functions internally when enabling/disabling your mod in the UI, when joining/disconnecting from a modded server and so on. Note that both OnEnable and OnDisable return true. This is a status indicator for Puck to know that your mod initialized or shutdown successfully. For any failures, make sure to return false, as other system rely on this response to operate correctly! For the sake of keeping this guide simple, let's print out a simple "Hello world!" to the console.

7. Build the project with dotnet build:

   

Great! Your mod now has access to the Puck API along with any libraries Puck itself depends on by default. Head over to the next section to see how we can actually run your mod within the game.