Unity.InternalAPIEditorBridge.012 in multiple projects connected as packages

[mrtrizer]

I have rather a non-conventional case. We have multiple Unity projects, each one connects many modules, for faster build, easier development and running unit tests we connect all these projects together using package manager (we just have package.json in every project's Asset dir)

It looks like this:

Project1 [depends on Module1, Module2]
     Assets/.../Bridge/
          Unity.InternalAPIEditorBridge.012.asmdef
Project2 [depends on Module1, Module2]
     Assets/.../Bridge/
          Unity.InternalAPIEditorBridge.012.asmdef
Unified Project [depends on Project1/Assets, Project2/Assets, Module1, Module2]
     Assets/.../Bridge/
          Unity.InternalAPIEditorBridge.012.asmdef

If we put black-magic Unity.InternalAPIEditorBridge.012.asmdef in every our project, unified project will start having conflicts and won't build.

Do you know any simple workaround to this problem?

[vanifatovvlad]

You can try to pack the contents of the Bridge folder into a separate package and include it as a git package into each project

[mrtrizer]

Thank you. I tried to put it into your package and it worked. I thought it should be in Assets in order to work. But it works fine even if I put bridge asmdef into Tri-Inspector itself. 😄
Now I'm wondering, why adding this extra step with bridge installation if it works without it? 🤔 Does this cause any problems?
It also works if I just put Bridge.asmdef right into Unity.InternalAPIEditorBridge.012 dir, removing asmref.
I'm using 2021.3.10f1

[vanifatovvlad]

Unity doesn't allow third-party libraries to access internal members. However packages developed by Unity itself can do this via bridges. Bridge012 is used for DOTS. And there are two cheat ways to use it:

• put the asmdef into the package, but then Tri Inspector will conflict with some of DOTS packages
• put the asmref into the package. This requires you to manually add the asmdef if the project does not use DOTS. However it allows you to resolve the conflict with DOTS by deleting this file

[mrtrizer]

Thank you very much for the explanation! I had no clue how this trick works. In this case it seems we are safe using your library.