EditorNetworkDeviceDiscovery

EditorNetworkDeviceDiscovery copied to clipboard

#Network Device Discovery

Network device discovery is a tool that allows you to easily get a list of devices that are currently on the same network.

Why would you need this?

Let's say you creating your own Unity editor tool that needs to connect to a device running your game/app in order to communicate with it. To do that, you need to know the device's IP address. Your default option is to ask the user for it but that is a time-consuming and frustrating thing to do.

Usage

With this tool, you just need to perform four simple steps:

• Install it by importing NetworkDeviceDiscovery.unitypackage
• Add NetworkDeviceDiscovery/Prefabs/Beacon.preafb to your first scene.
• Build and run it to a device (or just enter play mode)
• Inside your editor script, create a Probe instance and get the ConnectedDevices property

ConnectedDevices is a List<Device> with each Device being a simple class

public class Device
{
	public string Name;
	public string Model;
	public RuntimePlatform Platform;
	public string IPAddress;
}

A Beacon broadcasts a ping with a given frequency and a Probe listens for beacons and keeps an internal list of active ones.

As an example here is a very simple Editor window that lists all connected devices

public class DeviceListEditorWindow : EditorWindow {

	Probe probe = new Probe();
	Device selectedDevice;
	DeviceList beaconList;
	
	void OnEnable() {
		beaconList = new DeviceList (probe);
		probe.Start();
	}

	void OnDisable() {
		probe.Stop ();
	}

	public void OnGUI ()
	{
		beaconList.Draw ();
		Repaint ();
	}
}

with DeviceList being a simple helper class to draw the actual popup list

public class DeviceList {

		public Device SelectedDevice {get; private set;}

		Probe probe;

		public DeviceList(Probe probe) {
			this.probe = probe;
		}

		public void Draw() {
			
			var connectedDevices = probe.ConnectedDevices;
			var selectedDeviceIndex = 0;
			if (SelectedDevice != null)
				selectedDeviceIndex = connectedDevices.IndexOf (SelectedDevice);
			if (selectedDeviceIndex < 0)
				selectedDeviceIndex = 0;

			selectedDeviceIndex = EditorGUILayout.Popup (selectedDeviceIndex, connectedDevices.Select (device => device.ToString()).ToArray());

			if (selectedDeviceIndex >= 0 && selectedDeviceIndex < connectedDevices.Count)
				SelectedDevice = connectedDevices [selectedDeviceIndex];
		}
	}
}

Compatibility

This tool was tested in OSX, Android, and iOS but it should work on any platform that supports the System.Net.Sockets namespace.