Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Shaun Ferns
Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Shaun Ferns

Overview of this book

If you are a Unity developer looking to explore the newest features of Unity 2021 and recipes for advanced challenges, then this fourth edition of Unity Cookbook is here to help you. With this cookbook, you’ll work through a wide variety of recipes that will help you use the essential features of the Unity game engine to their fullest potential. You familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graph before exploring animation features to enhance your skills in building games. As you progress, you will gain insights into Unity's latest editor, which will help you in laying out scenes, tweaking existing apps, and building custom tools for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. The book will also guide you through many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques, teaching you how to communicate with database-driven websites and process XML and JSON data files. By the end of this Unity book, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Unity game development and built your development skills. The easy-to-follow recipes will earn a permanent place on your bookshelf for reference and help you build better games that stay true to your vision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
3
Inventory and Advanced UIs
6
2D Animation and Physics
13
Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More
15
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)

Creating a runtime UI Toolkit interface

First, there was Immediate Mode GUI (IMGUI), where code was required for all UI development. For IMGUI, the UI was redrawn every frame. Then came uGUI, the current Unity UI system, which is a retained-mode system, where UI elements are created and stay in view until they're changed. While uGUI is fine for most runtime game requirements, an IMGUI approach is still needed for most design-time editor extensions. This is a retained-mode UI system, which can be used for both runtime and design-time UIs. The UI Toolkit has an XML file to describe the elements in the UI, and style-sheet files to specify how they will look and be laid out. If you are used to HTML and CSS, then you'll find UXML and USS very familiar. There is even a C# query system based on hierarchy matching that's similar to jQuery and LINQ (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/concepts/linq/).

In this recipe, you&apos...