Supported Primitives

When creating a RealtimeModel, only specific primitives can be used. This page includes a full list of supported primitives as well as edge-cases related to equality checks, collections, and nested models.

Supported C# primitives

bool, byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, float, double, string

Supported Unity primitives

Color, Vector2, Vector3, Vector4, Quaternion

Supported Collections

• RealtimeArray
• RealtimeSet
• RealtimeDictionary
• StringKeyDictionary

See the Collections page for more information.

note

Built-in C# collections like List and Dictionary are not supported because Normcore cannot efficiently detect when their contents have changed.

Support for byte[] arrays

Models support byte[] arrays as properties out of the box, however, most users will want to disable equality checks as they only check the reference and not the contents of the byte[] array itself. Leaving equality checks on means that Normcore will only synchronize the property if the byte[] array is set to a new reference.

[RealtimeModel]
public partial class MyModel {
    [RealtimeProperty(1, false, true, includeEqualityCheck: false)]
    private byte[] _rawData = new byte[0];
}

public class MyComponent : RealtimeComponent<MyModel> {
    private Update() {
        // Fetch the model
        byte[] rawData = model.rawData;

        // Update a byte in the buffer
        rawData[0] = 0xff;

        // Update the property to tell Normcore the value has changed.
        // Since the rawData property has includeEqualityCheck set to false, the buffer will
        // be synchronized to all clients even though the byte[] object reference has not changed. 
        model.rawData = rawData;
    }
}

Support for nested models

Models can contain other models as properties:

[RealtimeModel]
public partial class MyModel {
    [RealtimeProperty(1, true)] private MyNestedModel _nestedModel;
}

[RealtimeModel]
public partial class MyNestedModel {
    [RealtimeProperty(1, true)] private string _name;
}

All functionality will work as expected.

Equality checks

By default, when a model property is updated, Normcore will run an equality check to ensure the value has changed before sending an update to keep bandwidth use as low as possible.

note

The equality check uses the == operator which behaves differently depending on the type being compared.

There are cases where you will want Normcore to serialize and send a value every time it's set, regardless of whether the value has changed.

In order to accomplish this, RealtimeProperty has an includeEqualityCheck argument that can be set to false. When includeEqualityCheck is set to false, Normcore will mark the property to be serialized and sent to all players every time the setter is called.

[RealtimeModel]
public partial class MyModel {
    [RealtimeProperty(1, false, true, includeEqualityCheck: false)]
    private byte[] _rawData = new byte[0];
}

public class MyComponent : RealtimeComponent<MyModel> {
    private Update() {
        // Fetch the model
        byte[] rawData = model.rawData;

        // Update a byte in the buffer
        rawData[0] = 0xff;

        // Update the property to tell Normcore the value has changed.
        // Since the rawData property has includeEqualityCheck set to false, the buffer will
        // be synchronized to all clients even though the byte[] object reference has not changed. 
        model.rawData = rawData;
    }
}

note

The equality check setting has no effect on nested model properties.