Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2019 - Fourth Edition

By : Harrison Ferrone
Book Image

Learning C# by Developing Games with Unity 2019 - Fourth Edition

By: Harrison Ferrone

Overview of this book

Learning to program in today’s technical landscape can be a daunting task, especially when faced with the sheer number of languages you have to choose from. Luckily, Learning C# with Unity 2019 removes the guesswork and starts you off on the path to becoming a confident, and competent, programmer using game development with Unity. You’ll start off small by learning the building blocks of programming, from variables, methods, and conditional statements to classes and object-oriented systems. After you have the basics under your belt you’ll explore the Unity interface, creating C# scripts, and translating your newfound knowledge into simple game mechanics. Throughout this journey, you’ll get hands-on experience with programming best practices and macro-level topics such as manager classes and flexible application architecture. By the end of the book, you’ll be familiar with intermediate C# topics like generics, delegates, and events, setting you up to take on projects of your own.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Programming Foundations and C#
7
Section 2: Scripting Game Mechanics in Unity
12
Section 3: Leveling Up Your C# Code

Navigating in Unity

When we talk about navigation in real life, it's usually a conversation about how to get from point A to point B. Navigating around virtual 3D space is largely the same, but how do we account for the experiential knowledge we humans have accumulated since the day we first started crawling? Everything from walking on a flat surface to climbing stairs and jumping off of curbs is a skill we learned by doing; how can we possibly program all that into a game without going insane?

Navigation components

The short answer is that Unity has spent a lot of time perfecting their navigation system and delivering components that we can use to govern how playable and non-playable characters can get around. Each of the following components comes standard with Unity and has complex features already built-in:

  • A NavMesh is essentially a map of the walkable surfaces in a given level; the NavMesh itself is created from the level geometry...