Book Image

Unity 2018 Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Matt Smith, Francisco Queiroz
4 (2)
Book Image

Unity 2018 Cookbook - Third Edition

4 (2)
By: Matt Smith, Francisco Queiroz

Overview of this book

With the help of the Unity 2018 Cookbook, you’ll discover how to make the most of the UI system and understand how to animate both 2D and 3D characters and game scene objects using Unity's Mecanim animation toolsets. Once you’ve got to grips with the basics, you will familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graphs, followed by understanding the animation features to enhance your skills in building fantastic games. In addition to this, you will discover AI and navigation techniques for nonplayer character control and later explore Unity 2018’s newly added features to improve your 2D and 3D game development skills. This book provides many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have gained comprehensive knowledge in game development with Unity 2018.

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Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Get in touch
Free Chapter
1
Displaying Data with Core UI Elements
Displaying Data with Core UI Elements
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 Mesh
Creating sophisticated text with TextMeshPro
Displaying an image
Creating UIs with the Fungus open source dialog system
Creating a Fungus character dialog with images
2
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
Introduction
Creating UI Buttons to move between scenes
Animating button properties on mouse-over
Organizing image panels and changing panel depths via buttons
Displaying the value of an interactive UI Slider
Displaying a countdown timer graphically with a UI Slider
Setting custom mouse cursors for 2D and 3D GameObjects
Setting custom mouse cursors for UI controls
Interactive text entry with an Input Field
Toggles and radio buttons via Toggle Groups
Creating text and image icon UI Dropdown menus
Displaying a radar to indicate the relative locations of objects
3
Inventory UIs
Inventory UIs
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 multiple status icons
Using panels to visually outline the inventory UI area and individual items
Creating a C# inventory slot UI display scripted component
Using UI Grid Layout Groups to automatically populate a panel
Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as a list of text via a dynamic List<> of scripted PickUp objects
Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as text totals via a dynamic Dictionary<> of PickUp objects and enum pickup types
4
Playing and Manipulating Sounds
Playing and Manipulating Sounds
Introduction
Playing different one-off sound effects with a single AudioSource component
Playing and controlling different sounds each with their own AudioSource component
Creating just-in-time AudioSource components at runtime through C# scripting
Delaying before playing a sound
Preventing an Audio Clip from restarting if it is already playing
Waiting for the audio to finish playing before auto-destructing an object
Creating a metronome through the precise scheduling of sounds with dspTime
Matching the audio pitch to the animation speed
Simulating acoustic environments with Reverb Zones
Adding volume control with Audio Mixers
Making a dynamic soundtrack with Snapshots
Balancing in-game audio with Ducking
Audio visualization from sample spectral data
Synchronizing simultaneous and sequential music to create a simple 140 bpm music-loop manager
5
Creating Textures, Maps, and Materials
Creating Textures, 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
6
Shader Graphs and Video Players
Shader Graphs and Video Players
Introduction
Playing videos by manually adding a VideoPlayer component to a GameObject
Using scripting to control video playback on scene textures
Using scripting to play a sequence of videos back-to-back
Creating and using a simple Shader Graph
Creating a glow effect with Shader Graph
Toggling a Shader Graph color glow effect through C# code
7
Using Cameras
Using Cameras
Introduction
Creating the basic scene for this chapter
Creating a picture-in-picture effect
Switching between multiple cameras
Making textures from screen content
Zooming a telescopic camera
Displaying a minimap
Creating an in-game surveillance Camera
Working with Unity's multi-purpose camera rig
Using Cinemachine ClearShot to switch cameras to keep the player in shot
Letting the player switch to a Cinemachine FreeLook camera
8
Lights and Effects
Lights and Effects
Introduction
Directional Light with cookie Texture to simulate a cloudy day
Creating and applying a cookie texture to a spotlight
Adding a custom Reflection map to a scene
Creating a laser aim with a projector
Enhancing the laser aim with a Line Renderer
Setting up an environment with Procedural Skybox and Directional Light
Reflecting surrounding objects with Reflection Probes
Using Material Emission to bake light from a glowing lamp onto scene objects
Lighting a simple scene with Lightmaps and Light Probes
9
2D Animation
2D Animation
Introduction
Flipping a sprite horizontally – the DIY approach
Flipping a sprite horizontally – using Animator State Chart and Transitions
Animating body parts for character movement events
Creating a three-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
Creating a platform game with Tiles and Tilemaps
Creating a game with the 2D Gamekit
10
3D Animation
3D Animation
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 scripts
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
Creating geometry with Probuilder
Creating a game with the 3D Gamekit
Importing third-party 3D models and animations from Mixamo
11
Webserver Communication and Online Version-Control
Webserver Communication and Online Version-Control
Introduction
Setting up a leaderboard using PHP and a database
Unity game communication with web-server leaderboard
Creating and cloning a GitHub repository
Adding a Unity project to a local Git repository, and pushing files up to GitHub
Unity project version-control using GitHub for Unity
Preventing your game from running on unknown servers
12
Controlling and Choosing Positions
Controlling and Choosing Positions
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 – finding a random spawn point
Choosing destinations – finding the nearest spawn point
Choosing destinations – respawning to the most recently passed checkpoint
Moving objects by clicking on them
Firing projectiles in the direction of movement
13
Navigation Meshes and Agents
Navigation Meshes and Agents
Introduction
NPC to travel to destination while avoiding obstacles
NPC to seek or flee from a moving object
Point-and-click move to object
Point-and-click move to tile
Point-and-click Raycast with user-defined higher-cost Navigation Areas
NPC NavMeshAgent to follow waypoints in a sequence
Controlling object group movement through flocking
Creating a movable NavMesh Obstacle
14
Design Patterns
Design Patterns
Introduction
State-driven behavior DIY states
State-driven behavior using the State Design Pattern
State-driven behavior with Unity Scriptable Objects
Publisher-Subscriber pattern C# delegates and events
Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern
15
Editor Extensions and Immediate Mode GUI (IMGUI)
Editor Extensions and Immediate Mode GUI (IMGUI)
Introduction
Menu items to log messages and clear the console
Displaying a panel with text data
An interactive panel with persistent storage
Creating GameObjects, parenting, and registering Undo actions
Working with selected objects and deactivating menu items
Menu item to create 100 randomly positioned prefab clones
A progress bar to display proportion completed of Editor extension processing
An editor extension to allow pickup type (and parameters) to be changed at design time via a custom Inspector UI
An editor extension to have an object-creator GameObject, with buttons to instantiate different pickups at cross-hair object location in scene
Extensible class-based code architecture to manage complex IMGUIs
16
Working with External Resource Files and Devices
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 or StreamingAssets folders
Saving Project files into Unity Asset Bundles
Loading resources from Unity Asset Bundles
17
Working with Plain Text, XML, and JSON Text Files
Working with Plain Text, XML, and JSON Text Files
Introduction
Loading external text files using the TextAsset public variable
Loading external text files using C# file streams
Saving external text files with C# file streams
Loading and parsing external XML
Creating XML text data manually using XMLWriter
Saving and loading XML text data automatically through serialization
Creating XML text files – saving XML directly to text files with XMLDocument.Save()
Creating JSON strings from individual objects and lists of objects
Creating individual objects and Lists of objects from JSON strings
18
Virtual Reality and Extra Features
Virtual Reality and Extra Features
Introduction
Saving screenshots from the game
Saving and loading player data – using static properties
Saving and loading player data – using PlayerPrefs
Loading game data from a text file map
UI Slider to change game quality settings
Pausing the game
Implementing slow motion
Using Gizmo to show the currently selected object in a scene panel
Editor snap-to grid drawn by Gizmo
Creating a VR project
Adding 360-degree videos to a VR project
Working with VR content inside a VR environment – the XR Editor
19
Automated Testing
Automated Testing
Introduction
Generating a default test script class
A simple unit test
Parameterizing tests with a data provider method
Unit testing a simple health script class
Creating and executing a unit test in Play mode
PlayMode testing a door animation
PlayMode and Unit Testing a player health bar with events, logging, and exceptions
20
Bonus Chapters
Bonus Chapters
Working with External Resource Files and Devices
Working with Plain Text, XML, and JSON Text Files
Virtual Reality and Extra Features
Automated Testing
21
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Reflecting surrounding objects with Reflection Probes

If you want your scene's environment to be reflected by Game Objects by featuring reflective Materials (such as the ones with high Metallic or Specular levels), then you can achieve such an effect by using Reflection Probes. They allow for real-time, baked, or even Custom reflections through the use of Cubemaps.

real-time reflections can be expensive in terms of processing; in which case, you should favor baked reflections, unless it's really necessary to display dynamic objects being reflected (mirror-like objects, for instance). Still, there are some ways real-time reflections can be optimized. In this recipe, we will test three different configurations for reflection probes:

  • real-time reflections (constantly updated)
  • real-time reflections (updated on-demand via scripting)
  • baked reflections (from the editor)
...
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