- Unity 5.x Cookbook
- Table of Contents
- Unity 5.x Cookbook
- Credits
- Foreword
- About the Authors
- About the Reviewers
- www.PacktPub.com
- Preface
- 1. Core UI – Messages, Menus, Scores, and Timers
- Introduction
- Displaying a "Hello World" UI text message
- Displaying a digital clock
- Displaying a digital countdown timer
- Creating a message that fades away
- Displaying a perspective 3D text message
- Displaying an image
- Creating UI Buttons to move between scenes
- Organizing images inside panels and changing panel depths via buttons
- Displaying the value of an interactive UI Slider
- Displaying a countdown timer graphically with a UI Slider
- Displaying a radar to indicate the relative locations of objects
- Creating UIs with the Fungus open-source dialog system
- Setting custom mouse cursor images
- Input Fields component for text entry
- Toggles and radio buttons via Toggle Groups
- Conclusion
- 2. Inventory GUIs
- Introduction
- Creating a simple 2D mini-game – SpaceGirl
- Displaying single object pickups with carrying and not-carrying text
- Displaying single object pickups with carrying and not-carrying icons
- Displaying multiple pickups of the same object with text totals
- Displaying multiple pickups of the same object with multiple status icons
- Revealing icons for multiple object pickups by changing the size of a tiled image
- Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as a list of text via a dynamic List<> of PickUp objects
- Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as text totals via a dynamic Dictionary<> of PickUp objects and "enum" pickup types
- Generalizing multiple icon displays using UI Grid Layout Groups (with scrollbars!)
- Conclusion
- 3. 2D Animation
- Introduction
- Flipping a sprite horizontally
- Animating body parts for character movement events
- Creating a 3-frame animation clip to make a platform continually animate
- Making a platform start falling once stepped-on using a Trigger to move animation from one state to another
- Creating animation clips from sprite sheet sequences
- Conclusion
- 4. Creating Maps and Materials
- Introduction
- Creating a basic material with Standard Shader (Specular setup)
- Adapting a basic material from Specular setup to Metallic
- Applying Normal maps to a material
- Adding Transparency and Emission maps to a material
- Highlighting materials at mouse over
- Adding Detail maps to a material
- Fading the transparency of a material
- Playing videos inside a scene
- Conclusion
- 5. Using Cameras
- 6. Lights and Effects
- Introduction
- Using lights and cookie textures to simulate a cloudy day
- Adding a custom Reflection map to a scene
- Creating a laser aim with Projector and Line Renderer
- Reflecting surrounding objects with Reflection Probes
- Setting up an environment with Procedural Skybox and Directional Light
- Lighting a simple scene with Lightmaps and Light Probes
- Conclusion
- 7. Controlling 3D Animations
- Introduction
- Configuring a character's Avatar and idle animation
- Moving your character with root motion and Blend Trees
- Mixing animations with Layers and Masks
- Organizing States into Sub-state Machines
- Transforming the Character Controller via script
- Adding rigid props to animated characters
- Using Animation Events to throw an object
- Applying Ragdoll physics to a character
- Rotating the character's torso to aim a weapon
- 8. Positions, Movement and Navigation for Character GameObjects
- Introduction
- Player control of a 2D GameObject (and limiting the movement within a rectangle)
- Player control of a 3D GameObject (and limiting the movement within a rectangle)
- Choosing destinations – find the nearest (or a random) spawn point
- Choosing destinations – respawn to the most recently passed checkpoint
- NPC NavMeshAgent to seek or flee destination while avoiding obstacles
- NPC NavMeshAgent to follow the waypoints in a sequence
- Controlling the object group movement through flocking
- Conclusion
- 9. Playing and Manipulating Sounds
- Introduction
- Matching the audio pitch to the animation speed
- Simulating acoustic environments with Reverb Zones
- Preventing an Audio Clip from restarting if it is already playing
- Waiting for audio to finish playing before auto-destructing an object
- Adding volume control with Audio Mixers
- Making a dynamic soundtrack with Snapshots
- Balancing in-game audio with Ducking
- 10. Working with External Resource Files and Devices
- Introduction
- Loading external resource files – using Unity Default Resources
- Loading external resource files – by downloading files from the Internet
- Loading external resource files – by manually storing files in the Unity Resources folder
- Saving and loading player data – using static properties
- Saving and loading player data – using PlayerPrefs
- Saving screenshots from the game
- Setting up a leaderboard using PHP/MySQL
- Loading game data from a text file map
- Managing Unity project code using Git version control and GitHub hosting
- Publishing for multiple devices via Unity Cloud
- 11. Improving Games with Extra Features and Optimization
- Introduction
- Pausing the game
- Implementing slow motion
- Preventing your game from running on unknown servers
- State-driven behavior Do-It-Yourself states
- State-driven behavior using the State Design pattern
- Reducing the number of objects by destroying objects at death a time
- Reducing the number of enabled objects by disabling objects whenever possible
- Reducing the number of active objects by making objects inactive whenever possible
- Improving efficiency with delegates and events and avoiding SendMessage!
- Executing methods regularly but independent of frame rate with coroutines
- Spreading long computations over several frames with coroutines
- Evaluating performance by measuring max and min frame rates (FPS)
- Identifying performance bottlenecks with the Unity performance Profiler
- Identifying performance "bottlenecks" with Do-It-Yourself performance profiling
- Cache GameObject and component references to avoid expensive lookups
- Improving performance with LOD groups
- Improving performance through reduced draw calls by designing for draw call batching
- Conclusion
- 12. Editor Extensions
- Introduction
- An editor extension to allow pickup type (and parameters) to be changed at design time via a custom Inspector UI
- An editor extension to add 100 randomly located copies of a prefab with one menu click
- A progress bar to display proportion completed of Editor extension processing
- An editor extension to have an object-creator GameObject, with buttons to instantiate different pickups at cross-hair object location in scene
- Conclusion
- Index
Not so long ago developing professional quality games meant licensing an expensive game engine (or writing one yourself) and hiring a small army of developers to use it. Today, game engines like Unity have democratized game development to the point where you can simply download the tools and start making the game of your dreams right away.
Well... kinda.
Having a powerful game creation tool is not the same thing as having the technical knowledge and skills to use it effectively. I've been developing games and game tools professionally for over 13 years. When I took the plunge into learning Unity development, I quickly found that there was a huge amount of online documentation, tutorials and forum answers available for Unity developers. This makes getting started with Unity development very easy. It's fantastic that this information is out there, but it can also be quite fragmented. A lot of the time the piece of the puzzle you are missing is buried 40 minutes into an hour-long tutorial video or on the 15th page of a long forum thread. The hours you spend looking for these nuggets of wisdom are time that would be better spent working on your game.
The beauty of the Unity 5.x Cookbook is that Matt and Chico have done the tedious legwork of finding this information for you and distilled it into a neat collection of easy to follow step-by-step recipes (and provided the scripts and complete working projects for you to download). Unity development covers a vast range of topics, so the authors have sensibly focused on those areas that almost all developers will encounter. If you're serious about developing great games and tools with Unity, then you'll need to master just the kinds of topics you'll find in this book.
Getting started with Unity development is free and easy. When you're ready to take your skills to the next level, this book is an easy and effective way to do it. It covers a great deal in its hundreds of pages, and if you can master even half of what's here you'll be well on the way to becoming a great Unity developer.
Chris Gregan
Founder & Developer
Fungus Ltd
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