Overview

The Firebase Realtime Database is used to manage persistent data in MechaHamster. This includes:

• User profile data
• Saved maps
• Bonus maps

MechaHamster uses Firebase Auth to manage user identites, and tie persistent user data to accounts. Uses Firebase to assign unique userIDs (tied to accounts), which can be used by the Firebase Realtime Database as a unique key for user data.

Code Locations

Most of the Database code is abstracted through the class Assets/Hamster/Scripts/Database/DBStruct.cs - it represents a struct that is in communication with the database, and needs to be kept in synch, and occasionally pushed to the remote server.

It's a template class, and accepts most simple structures (composed of basic types), and handles serialization and deserialization as they are sent to and from the database.

Note that due to some quirks of the Unity json serializer, native dictionaries do not serialize correctly. MechaHamster works around this with the SerializableDict class, located in Assets/Hamster/Scripts/LevelMap.cs. The class also includes a full description of the problem (and workarounds) in the comments.

Viewing in the Console

From the Firebase Console, select your Firebase project, and click "Database" from the menu on the left. This brings you to the database explorer. From here, you can view all of the entries in the database. It also updates in real time, so changes made while playing the game will be reflected in the view.

The most interesting datasets are the MapList and DB_Users nodes. MapList contains a list of every user-created map that has been saved to the database.

DB_Users contains the user data based on every user that has made an account (including anonymous sign-ins) and played the game. This is probably some of the most human-readable data - it is just a serialized version of the UserData struct, found in /Assets/Hamster/Scripts/UserData.cs.