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 Scene View is an editor window that allows you to look around your game scene and manipulate its contents. The following screenshot illustrates the Scene View:

At this point you know that almost everything in Unity is customizable, and the Scene View is no exception.

In this chapter, we will cover how to add GUI to the Scene View and change the common behavior it has to make it work specifically for our Level Creator tool.

Defining the chapter goals

In this chapter we want to customize the Scene View to follow the workflow of the Level Creator tool, this means the user is capable of viewing the level and adding, deleting, and editing level piece prefabs.

The goals here are:

  • Defining the Level Creator interaction modes

  • Adding the necessary GUI to support the mode selection

  • Capturing mouse events

  • Implementing the functionality of each mode

The final result that we will achieve looks like this:

Note

As we mentioned in Chapter 2, Using Gizmos in the Scene View, we will assume that the Level...