Unity 5.x Cookbook

Unity 5.x Cookbook

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.

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

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

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

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

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

Using Cameras

Introduction

Creating a picture-in-picture effect

Switching between multiple cameras

Making textures from screen content

Zooming a telescopic camera

Displaying a mini-map

Creating an in-game surveillance camera

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Reviews

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Displaying an image

There are many cases where we wish to display an image onscreen, including logos, maps, icons, splash graphics, and so on. In this recipe, we will display an image at the top of the screen, and make it stretch to fit whatever width that the screen is resized to.

The following screenshot shows Unity displaying an image:

Getting ready

For this recipe, we have prepared the image that you need in a folder named Images in the 1362_01_06 folder.

How to do it...

To display a stretched image, follow these steps:

Create a new Unity 3D project.
Note
3D projects will, by default, import images as a Texture, and 2D projects will import images as Sprite (2D and UI). Since we're going to use a RawImage UI component, we need our images to be imported as textures.
Set the Game panel to a 400 x 300 size. Do this via menu: Edit | Project Settings | Player. Ensure that the Resolution | Default is Full Screen setting check is unchecked, and the width/height is set to 400 x 300. Then, in the Game panel, select Stand Alone (400 x 300). This will allow us to test the stretching of our image to a width of 400 pixels.
Import the provided folder, which is called Images. In the Inspector tab, ensure that the unity5_learn image has Texture Type set to Texture. If it does not, then choose Texture from the drop-down list, and click on the Apply button. The following screenshot shows the Inspector tab with the Texture settings:
In the Hierarchy panel, add a UI | RawImage GameObject to the scene named RawImage-unity5.
Note
If you wish to prevent the distortion and stretching of an image, then use the UI Sprite GameObject instead, and ensure that you check the Preserve Aspect option, in its Image (Script) component, in the Inspector panel.
Ensure that the GameObject RawImage-unity5 is selected in the Hierarchy panel. From your Project folder (Images), drag the unity5_learn image into the Raw Image (Script) public property Texture. Click on the Set Native Size button to preview the image before it gets stretched, as shown:
Now, in Rect Transform, click on the Anchor Presets square icon, which will result in several rows and columns of preset position squares appearing. Hold down SHIFT and ALT and click on the top row and the stretch column.
The image will now be positioned neatly at the top of the Game panel, and will be stretched to the full width of 400 pixels.

How it works...

You have ensured that an image has Texture Type set to Texture. You added a UI RawImage control to the scene. The RawImage control has been made to display the unity5_learn image file.

The image has been positioned at the top of the Game panel, and using the anchor and pivot presets, it has made the image stretch to fill the whole width, which we set to 400 pixels via the Player settings.

There's more...

There are some details that you don't want to miss:

Working with Sprites and UI Image components

If you simply wish to display non-animated images, then Texture images and UI RawImage controls are the way to go. However, if you want more options on how an image should be displayed (such as tiling, and animation), then the UI Sprite control should be used instead. This control needs image files to be imported as the Sprite (2D and UI) type.

Once an image file has been dragged into the UI Image control's Sprite property, additional properties will be available, such as Image Type, options to preserve aspect ratio, and so on.

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Displaying an image

Getting ready

How to do it...

Note

Note

How it works...

There's more...

Working with Sprites and UI Image components

See also