Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game engines are central to the video games we know and love. From the artwork to the mathematics that underpin the frames onscreen, the engine calls the shots. Aside from offering one of the leading 3D game engines, Unity also provides a superlative development tool ñ a tool that can produce professional standard games for Mac, PC, and the Unity Web Player. This book is a complete exercise in game development covering environments, physics, sound, particles, and much more, to get you up and working with Unity quickly. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of developing 3D games before getting to grips with development in Unity itself. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating simple game elements you will learn everything you'll need to get started with game development for the PC, Mac, and Web. This book is designed to cover a set of easy to follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. By introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world, and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game. At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Soon you will be creating your own 3D games with ease!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Chapter 4. Interactions

In this chapter, we'll be looking at further interactions and dive into two of the most crucial elements of game development, namely, Collision Detection and Ray Casting.

To detect physical interactions between game objects, the most common method is to use a Collider component — an invisible net that surrounds an object's shape and is in charge of detecting collisions with other objects. The act of detecting and retrieving information from these collisions is known as collision detection.

Not only can we detect when two colliders interact, but we can also pre-empt a collision and perform many other useful tasks by utilizing a technique called Ray Casting, which draws a Ray — put simply, an invisible (non-rendered) vector line between two points in 3D space — which can also be used to detect an intersection with a game object's collider. Ray casting can also be used to retrieve lots of other useful information such as the length of the ray (therefore — distance), and...