Book Image

Unity 4.x Cookbook

By : Matt Smith, Chico Queiroz
Book Image

Unity 4.x Cookbook

By: Matt Smith, Chico Queiroz

Overview of this book

<p>Covering the latest version (Unity 4) of this established game engine, the Unity 4.x Cookbook explores a wide range of 3D, animation, multimedia, and scripting game features.<br /><br />The power of Unity 4 is demonstrated through the 10 chapters covering many of this game engine’s features.<br /><br />"Unity 4.x Cookbook" helps you learn how to make the most of the powerful but easy-to-use Unity 4 game engine. <br /><br />Every Unity game developer is different. Some come from a multimedia background, some are new to game development, and some are transferring from other engines. Whatever your background, with the breadth and depth of topics covered you should find new features and techniques to enhance your next game.<br /><br />This book offers detailed, easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes helping you master a wide range of Unity game features. <br /><br />Chapters are provided focusing on the basics; audio, cameras, images, materials and animations, GUIs, external resources and devices, directional and artificial intelligence character control, and performance optimization.<br /><br />"Unity 4.x Cookbook" provides a collection of ideas and resources that should offer new and useful techniques for every Unity game developer to enhance their next game.</p>

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Unity 4.x Cookbook
Matt Smith | Chico Queiroz
Jun, 2013 | 386 pages
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Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Unity 4.x Cookbook
Unity 4.x Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Authors
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Unity 4.x
Getting Started with Unity 4.x
Introduction
Installing Unity 4.x
Setting your preferences
Understanding and optimizing the User Interface
Saving assets created in Unity as Prefabs
Discovering Unity's content
Importing your own content
Importing Unity packages into your project
Importing custom packages into your project
Exporting custom packages from your project
Adding custom packages to Unity's quick list
Using the Project browser
2
Using Cameras
Using Cameras
Introduction
Creating a picture-in-picture effect
Switching between multiple cameras
Customizing the lens flare effect
Making textures from screen content
Zooming a telescopic camera
Making an inspect camera
Creating particle effects using Shuriken
Displaying a mini-map
3
Creating Maps and Materials
Creating Maps and Materials
Introduction
Creating a reflective material
Creating a self-illuminated material
Creating specular texture maps
Creating transparency texture maps
Using cookie textures to simulate a cloudy outdoor
Creating a color selection dialog
Combining textures in real time through the GUI
Highlighting materials at mouse over
Animating textures by looping through array of materials (for example, simulated video)
Disabling culling for a material
4
Creating GUIs
Creating GUIs
Introduction
Displaying a digital clock
Displaying an analogue clock
Displaying a compass to show player direction
Displaying a radar to indicate relative locations of objects
Displaying images for corresponding integers
Displaying images for corresponding floats and ranges
Displaying a digital countdown timer
Displaying a countdown timer graphically (5, 4, 3, 2, 1 – blast off)
Displaying a countdown timer graphically as a pie-chart style clock
Creating a message that fades away
Displaying inventory texts for single object pickups
Displaying inventory icons for single object pickups
Managing inventories with a general purpose PickUp class
Controlling the scrollbar with the mouse wheel
Implementing custom mouse cursor icons
5
Controlling Animations
Controlling Animations
Introduction
Configuring a character's Avatar and Idle animation
Moving your character with Root Motion and Blend Trees
Mixing animations with Layers and Masks
Overriding Root Motion via script
Adding rigid props to animated characters
Making an animated character throw an object
Applying ragdoll physics to a character
Rotating the character's torso to aim
6
Playing and Manipulating Sounds
Playing and Manipulating Sounds
Introduction
Matching audio pitch to animation speed
Adding customizable volume controls
Simulating a tunnel environment with Reverb Zones
Preventing the AudioClip from restarting if already playing
Waiting for audio to finish before auto-destructing an object
Making a dynamic soundtrack
7
Working with External Resource Files and Devices
Working with External Resource Files and Devices
Introduction
Loading external resource files – by Unity Default Resources
Loading external resource files – by manually storing files in Unity's Resources folder
Loading external resource files – by downloading files from the Internet
Saving and loading player data – using static properties
Saving and loading player data – using PlayerPrefs
Saving screenshots from the game
Control characters in Unity with the Microsoft Kinect using the Zigfu samples
Animating your own characters with the Microsoft Kinect controller
Homemade mocap by storing movements from the Microsoft Kinect controller
Setting up a leaderboard using PHP/MySQL
8
Working with External Text Files and XML Data
Working with External Text Files and XML Data
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 files
Creating XML text data manually using XMLWriter
Creating XML text data automatically through serialization
Creating XML text files – saving XML directly to text files with XMLDocument.Save()
9
Managing Object States and Controlling Their Movements
Managing Object States and Controlling Their Movements
Introduction
Controlling cube movement through player controls
Controlling object look-at behavior
Controlling object-to-object movements (seek, flee, follow at a distance)
Controlling object group movement through flocking
Firing objects by instantiation with forward velocity
Finding a random spawn point
Finding the nearest spawn point
Following waypoints in a sequence
Managing object behavior with states
Managing complex object behavior with the state pattern
10
Improving Games with Extra Features and Optimization
Improving Games with Extra Features and Optimization
Introduction
Pausing the game
Implementing slow motion
Implementing 3D stereography with polarized projection
Preventing your game from running on unknown servers
Identifying performance "bottlenecks" with code profiling
Reducing the number of objects by destroying objects at a "death" time
Reducing the number of enabled objects by disabling objects whenever possible
Improving efficiency with delegates and events (and avoiding SendMessage!)
Executing methods regularly but independent of frame rate with coroutines
Spreading long computations over several frames with coroutines
Caching, rather than component lookups and "reflection" over objects
11
Taking Advantage of Unity Pro
Taking Advantage of Unity Pro
Introduction
Dynamically focusing objects with Depth of Field
Creating a rearview mirror
Playing videos inside a scene
Simulating underwater ambience with audio filters
Loading and playing external movie files
Index
Index

Controlling cube movement through player controls

Many of the recipes in this chapter are built on this basic project, which constructs a scene with a textured terrain, a downward facing Main Camera, and a red cube (as shown in the following screenshot) that can be moved around by the user using the four directional arrow keys.

How to do it...

To create a player-controlled cube, perform the following steps:

  1. Start a new project by navigating to Terrain Textures | GoodDirt.psd from the Terrain Assets Unity package (uncheck all of the other contents of this package as we don't need them and they'll just bloat the size of the project).

  2. Create a terrain, positioned at (-15, 0, -10) and sized 30 by 20.

    Note

    Transform position for terrains relates to their corner not their center

    Since the Transform position of terrains relates to the corner of the object, we center such objects at (0, 0, 0) by setting the X-coordinate equal to (-1 x width/2) and the Z-coordinate to (-1 x length/2). In other words, we...

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