Book Image

Extending Unity with Editor Scripting

By : Angelo R Tadres Bustamante
Book Image

Extending Unity with Editor Scripting

By: Angelo R Tadres Bustamante

Overview of this book

One of Unity's most powerful features is the extensible editor it has. With editor scripting, it is possible to extend or create functionalities to make video game development easier. For a Unity developer, this is an important topic to know and understand because adapting Unity editor scripting to video games saves a great deal of time and resources. This book is designed to cover all the basic concepts of Unity editor scripting using a functional platformer video game that requires workflow improvement. You will commence with the basics of editor scripting, exploring its implementation with the help of an example project, a level editor, before moving on to the usage of visual cues for debugging with Gizmos in the scene view. Next, you will learn how to create custom inspectors and editor windows and implement custom GUI. Furthermore, you will discover how to change the look and feel of the editor using editor GUIStyles and editor GUISkins. You will then explore the usage of editor scripting in order to improve the development pipeline of a video game in Unity by designing ad hoc editor tools, customizing the way the editor imports assets, and getting control over the build creation process. Step by step, you will use and learn all the key concepts while creating and developing a pipeline for a simple platform video game. As a bonus, the final chapter will help you to understand how to share content in the Asset Store that shows the creation of custom tools as a possible new business. By the end of the book, you will easily be able to extend all the concepts to other projects.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
11
Index

Overview

The Inspector window displays detailed information about all the attached components and scripts of the currently selected game object. The following is an example of how the Inspector window looks. In this case, we are using the HazzardSpikes level piece prefab from Run & Jump.

Overview

You can use the inspectors to change properties and exposed variables from a component or script; at runtime, you can use them to find the right combination of values for your video game.

In a script, if you define a public variable of an object type (such as GameObject or Transform), you can drag and drop a game object or prefab into the inspector to make the assignment.

In this chapter, you will learn how to create custom inspector by following our own specifications and not the Unity default ones. In this case, we will work over the Level class inspector to make it part of the Level Creator tool workflow.

Defining the chapter goals

In this chapter, we will improve the Level class and use it to save the...