Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2019 - Fourth Edition

By : Harrison Ferrone
Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2019 - Fourth Edition

By: Harrison Ferrone

Overview of this book

Learning to program in today’s technical landscape can be a daunting task, especially when faced with the sheer number of languages you have to choose from. Luckily, Learning C# with Unity 2019 removes the guesswork and starts you off on the path to becoming a confident, and competent, programmer using game development with Unity. You’ll start off small by learning the building blocks of programming, from variables, methods, and conditional statements to classes and object-oriented systems. After you have the basics under your belt you’ll explore the Unity interface, creating C# scripts, and translating your newfound knowledge into simple game mechanics. Throughout this journey, you’ll get hands-on experience with programming best practices and macro-level topics such as manager classes and flexible application architecture. By the end of the book, you’ll be familiar with intermediate C# topics like generics, delegates, and events, setting you up to take on projects of your own.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Programming Foundations and C#
7
Section 2: Scripting Game Mechanics in Unity
12
Section 3: Leveling Up Your C# Code

Classes vs structs

Other than keywords and initial field values, we haven't seen much difference between classes and structs so far. Classes are best suited for grouping together complex actions and data that will change throughout a program; structs are a better choice for simple objects and data that will remain constant for the most part. Besides their uses, they are fundamentally different in one key area—that is, how they are passed, or assigned, between variables. Classes are reference types, meaning that they are passed by reference; structs are value types, meaning that they are passed by value.

Reference types

When the instances of our Character class are initialized, the hero and heroine variables don't actually hold their class information—instead, they hold a reference to where the object is located in the program's memory. If we assigned hero or heroine to another variable, the memory reference is actually assigned, not...