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  • Book Overview & Buying Unity 5.x Cookbook
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Unity 5.x Cookbook

Unity 5.x Cookbook

By : Matt Smith, Chico Queiroz
4.8 (17)
Buy this Book
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Unity 5.x Cookbook

Unity 5.x Cookbook

4.8 (17)
By: Matt Smith, Chico Queiroz
Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Unity 5 is a flexible and intuitive multiplatform game engine that is becoming the industry's de facto standard. Learn to craft your own 2D and 3D computer games by working through core concepts such as animation, audio, shaders, GUI, lights, cameras, and scripting to create your own games with one of the most important and popular engines in the industry. Completely re-written to cover the new features of Unity 5, this book is a great resource for all Unity game developers, from those who have recently started using Unity right up to game development experts. The first half of the book focuses on core concepts of 2D game design while the second half focuses on developing 3D game development skills. In the first half, you will discover the new GUI system, the new Audio Mixer, external files, and animating 2D characters in 2D game development. As you progress further, you will familiarize yourself with the new Standard Shaders, the Mecanim system, Cameras, and the new Lighting features to hone your skills towards building 3D games to perfection. Finally, you will learn non-player character control and explore Unity 5's extra features to enhance your 3D game development skills.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
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Preface
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Preface
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What this book covers
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What you need for this book
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Who this book is for
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Sections
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Conventions
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Reader feedback
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Customer support
Lock Free Chapter
1
1. Core UI – Messages, Menus, Scores, and Timers
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1. Core UI – Messages, Menus, Scores, and Timers
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Introduction
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Displaying a "Hello World" UI text message
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Displaying a digital clock
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Displaying a digital countdown timer
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Creating a message that fades away
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Displaying a perspective 3D text message
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Displaying an image
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Creating UI Buttons to move between scenes
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Organizing images inside panels and changing panel depths via buttons
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Displaying the value of an interactive UI Slider
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Displaying a countdown timer graphically with a UI Slider
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Displaying a radar to indicate the relative locations of objects
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Creating UIs with the Fungus open-source dialog system
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Setting custom mouse cursor images
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Input Fields component for text entry
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Toggles and radio buttons via Toggle Groups
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Conclusion
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2. Inventory GUIs
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2. Inventory GUIs
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Introduction
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Creating a simple 2D mini-game – SpaceGirl
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Displaying single object pickups with carrying and not-carrying text
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Displaying single object pickups with carrying and not-carrying icons
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Displaying multiple pickups of the same object with text totals
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Displaying multiple pickups of the same object with multiple status icons
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Revealing icons for multiple object pickups by changing the size of a tiled image
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Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as a list of text via a dynamic List<> of PickUp objects
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Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as text totals via a dynamic Dictionary<> of PickUp objects and "enum" pickup types
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Generalizing multiple icon displays using UI Grid Layout Groups (with scrollbars!)
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Conclusion
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3. 2D Animation
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3. 2D Animation
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Introduction
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Flipping a sprite horizontally
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Animating body parts for character movement events
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Creating a 3-frame animation clip to make a platform continually animate
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Making a platform start falling once stepped-on using a Trigger to move animation from one state to another
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Creating animation clips from sprite sheet sequences
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Conclusion
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4. Creating Maps and Materials
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4. Creating Maps and Materials
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Introduction
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Creating a basic material with Standard Shader (Specular setup)
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Adapting a basic material from Specular setup to Metallic
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Applying Normal maps to a material
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Adding Transparency and Emission maps to a material
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Highlighting materials at mouse over
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Adding Detail maps to a material
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Fading the transparency of a material
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Playing videos inside a scene
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Conclusion
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5. Using Cameras
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5. Using Cameras
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Introduction
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Creating a picture-in-picture effect
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Switching between multiple cameras
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Making textures from screen content
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Zooming a telescopic camera
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Displaying a mini-map
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Creating an in-game surveillance camera
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6. Lights and Effects
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6. Lights and Effects
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Introduction
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Using lights and cookie textures to simulate a cloudy day
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Adding a custom Reflection map to a scene
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Creating a laser aim with Projector and Line Renderer
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Reflecting surrounding objects with Reflection Probes
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Setting up an environment with Procedural Skybox and Directional Light
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Lighting a simple scene with Lightmaps and Light Probes
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Conclusion
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7. Controlling 3D Animations
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7. Controlling 3D Animations
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Introduction
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Configuring a character's Avatar and idle animation
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Moving your character with root motion and Blend Trees
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Mixing animations with Layers and Masks
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Organizing States into Sub-state Machines
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Transforming the Character Controller via script
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Adding rigid props to animated characters
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Using Animation Events to throw an object
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Applying Ragdoll physics to a character
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Rotating the character's torso to aim a weapon
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8. Positions, Movement and Navigation for Character GameObjects
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8. Positions, Movement and Navigation for Character GameObjects
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Introduction
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Player control of a 2D GameObject (and limiting the movement within a rectangle)
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Player control of a 3D GameObject (and limiting the movement within a rectangle)
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Choosing destinations – find the nearest (or a random) spawn point
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Choosing destinations – respawn to the most recently passed checkpoint
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NPC NavMeshAgent to seek or flee destination while avoiding obstacles
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NPC NavMeshAgent to follow the waypoints in a sequence
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Controlling the object group movement through flocking
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Conclusion
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9. Playing and Manipulating Sounds
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9. Playing and Manipulating Sounds
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Introduction
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Matching the audio pitch to the animation speed
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Simulating acoustic environments with Reverb Zones
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Preventing an Audio Clip from restarting if it is already playing
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Waiting for audio to finish playing before auto-destructing an object
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Adding volume control with Audio Mixers
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Making a dynamic soundtrack with Snapshots
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Balancing in-game audio with Ducking
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10. Working with External Resource Files and Devices
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10. Working with External Resource Files and Devices
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Introduction
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Loading external resource files – using Unity Default Resources
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Loading external resource files – by downloading files from the Internet
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Loading external resource files – by manually storing files in the Unity Resources folder
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Saving and loading player data – using static properties
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Saving and loading player data – using PlayerPrefs
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Saving screenshots from the game
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Setting up a leaderboard using PHP/MySQL
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Loading game data from a text file map
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Managing Unity project code using Git version control and GitHub hosting
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Publishing for multiple devices via Unity Cloud
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11. Improving Games with Extra Features and Optimization
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11. Improving Games with Extra Features and Optimization
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Introduction
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Pausing the game
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Implementing slow motion
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Preventing your game from running on unknown servers
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State-driven behavior Do-It-Yourself states
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State-driven behavior using the State Design pattern
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Reducing the number of objects by destroying objects at death a time
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Reducing the number of enabled objects by disabling objects whenever possible
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Reducing the number of active objects by making objects inactive whenever possible
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Improving efficiency with delegates and events and avoiding SendMessage!
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Executing methods regularly but independent of frame rate with coroutines
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Spreading long computations over several frames with coroutines
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Evaluating performance by measuring max and min frame rates (FPS)
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Identifying performance bottlenecks with the Unity performance Profiler
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Identifying performance "bottlenecks" with Do-It-Yourself performance profiling
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Cache GameObject and component references to avoid expensive lookups
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Improving performance with LOD groups
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Improving performance through reduced draw calls by designing for draw call batching
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Conclusion
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12. Editor Extensions
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12. Editor Extensions
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Introduction
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An editor extension to allow pickup type (and parameters) to be changed at design time via a custom Inspector UI
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An editor extension to add 100 randomly located copies of a prefab with one menu click
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A progress bar to display proportion completed of Editor extension processing
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An editor extension to have an object-creator GameObject, with buttons to instantiate different pickups at cross-hair object location in scene
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Conclusion
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Index
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Index

Creating UIs with the Fungus open-source dialog system

Rather than constructing your own UI and interactions from scratch each time, there are plenty of UI and dialogue systems available for Unity. One powerful, free, and open source dialog system is called Fungus, which uses a visual flowcharting approach to dialog design.

In this recipe, we'll create a very simple, two-sentence dialogue, to illustrate the basics of Fungus. The following screenshot shows the Fungus-generated dialog for the first sentence ('Hello, how are you') and the interactive button (a triangle inside a circle) the user clicks to progress to the next piece of dialog (in the bottom-right part of the rectangle).

Creating UIs with the Fungus open-source dialog system

How to do it...

To create a two-sentence dialog using Fungus, follow these steps:

  1. Download the latest version of the Fungus unitypackage from the FungusGames website http://www.fungusgames.com/.
  2. Create a new Unity 2D project.
  3. Import the Fungus unitypackage by navigating to Assets | Import Package | Custom Package..., and then navigating to your downloaded file location.
  4. Create a new Fungus Flowchart GameObject by choosing menu: Tools | Fungus | Create | Flowchart.
  5. Display and dock the Fungus Flowchart window panel by choosing menu: Tools | Fungus | Flowchart Window.
  6. There will be a block in the Flowchart Window. Click on this block to select it (a green border appears around the block to indicate that it is selected), and then in the Inspector panel, change the name of this block to Start, as shown in the following screenshot:
    How to do it...
  7. Each Block in a Flowchart follows a sequence of commands. So, we are now going to create a sequence of commands to display two sentences to the user when the game runs.

    Note

    The sequence of Commands in a Block

    Each Block in a Flowchart follows a sequence of Commands, so to display two sentences to the user when the game runs, we need to create a sequence of two Say commands in the Inspector panel properties for our Block.

  8. Ensure that the Start block is still selected in the Flowchart panel. Now, click on the plus +' button at the bottom section of the Inspector panel to display the menu of Commands, and select the Narrative | Say command, as shown here:
    How to do it...
  9. Since we only have one command for this block, that command will automatically be selected (highlighted green) in the top-half part of the Inspector view. The bottom half of the Inspector view presents the properties for the currently selected Command, as shown in the following screenshot. In the bottom-half part of the Inspector view, for the Story Text property, enter the text of the question that you wish to be presented to the user: How are you today?
    How to do it...
  10. Now, create another Say Command, and type the following for its Story Text property: Very well thank you.
  11. When you run the game, the user will first be presented with the How are you today? text (hearing a clicking noise as each letter is typed on screen). After the user clicks on the 'continue' triangle button (at the bottom-right part of the dialog window), they will then be presented with the second sentence: Very well thank you.

How it works...

You have created a new Unity project, and imported the Fungus asset package, containing the Fungus Unity menus, windows and commands, and also the example projects.

You have added a Fungus Flowchart to your scene with a single Block that you have named Start. Your block starts to execute when the game begins (since the default for the first block is to be executed upon receiving the Game Started event).

In the Start block, you added a sequence of two Say Commands. Each command presents a sentence to the user, and then waits for the continue button to be clicked before proceeding to the next Command.

As can be seen, the Fungus system handles the work of creating a nicely presented panel to the user, displaying the desired text and continue button. Fungus offers many more features, including menus, animations, control of sounds and music, and so on, details of which can be found by exploring their provided example projects, and their websites:

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