Feature Request Please make XRManagerSettings::loaders mutable in player

Hi,

To be able to support manually loading XR plugins at runtime in my application, (including support for command line options that allow users to disable or force the use of certain plugins) I'm currently duplicating some of the automatic loading logic inside XRManagerSettings due to the fact that there's no way for me to edit the list of loaders.

Currently the loaders property is guarded like this in XRManagerSettings.cs:

public List<XRLoader> loaders
{
get { return m_Loaders; }
#if UNITY_EDITOR
set { m_Loaders = value; }
#endif
}

and so the ordering and choice of loaders is only mutable while in the editor.

The loading logic is fairly simple so this isn't too much trouble but it seems like it would be preferable to still use XRManagerSettings even if I've disabled automatic plugin loading.

 

For reference it looks like the documentation here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.xr.management@3.2/manual/EndUser.html under the header "Customizing build and runtime settings" is implying that it's intended to be possible to modify this list of loaders at runtime?

 

just to reorder or remove loaders - not trying to add loaders

 

I don't think I'm the only person interested in being able to control the order of loading plugins at runtime or be able to disable plugins at runtime. For example please see here: https://snapandplug.com/xr-input-toolkit-2020-faq/ where someone has tried to document how this can be done (similarly also interpreting the official documentation to imply that some runtime control is possible).

In my case I'm successfully able to handle this in my application by borrowing the logic from XRManagerSettings and effectively giving myself a mutable list to work with - but it seems a little excessive to have to do this only because that list isn't mutable.

 

Right, blocking trying to add plugins sounds reasonable (expected even) but it seems like it should be possible to take a runtime approach for allowing re-ordering/removal but disallow addition to the list.

Maybe XManagerSettings could maintain a private, immutable whitelist of available loaders that's essentially set in stone at build time, and then just throw an exception in the setter if you try to include a loader that's not in the whiltelist?

I've tried submitting a 'bug' via the editor tool, since I couldn't see how else to file an issue - hopefully that works, thanks.

 

"Case 1276511" if that's the right ID?