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

Creating the base for an editor window

In this section, we will create the base code to get an editor window up and running in Unity.

Using the EditorWindow class

The EditorWindow class is part of the UnityEditor namespace and must be extended to any class used to create editor windows.

Note

To use the EditorWindow class, you must place your script inside an Editor folder, or in a folder nested inside an Editor folder.

Create a script called PaletteWindow.cs inside the folder Tools/LevelCreator/Editor, and then add the following code:

using UnityEngine;
using UnityEditor;

namespace RunAndJump.LevelCreator {
  public class PaletteWindow : EditorWindow {

    public static PaletteWindow instance;
        
    public static void ShowPalette () {
      instance = (PaletteWindow) EditorWindow.GetWindow (typeof(PaletteWindow));
      instance.titleContent = new GUIContent("Palette");
    }
}

The GetWindow method, which is part of the EditorWindow class, is responsible for getting an instance...