Unity 5.x Cookbook

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Overview of this book

Unity 5 is a flexible and intuitive multiplatform game engine that is becoming the industry's de facto standard. Learn to craft your own 2D and 3D computer games by working through core concepts such as animation, audio, shaders, GUI, lights, cameras, and scripting to create your own games with one of the most important and popular engines in the industry. Completely re-written to cover the new features of Unity 5, this book is a great resource for all Unity game developers, from those who have recently started using Unity right up to game development experts. The first half of the book focuses on core concepts of 2D game design while the second half focuses on developing 3D game development skills. In the first half, you will discover the new GUI system, the new Audio Mixer, external files, and animating 2D characters in 2D game development. As you progress further, you will familiarize yourself with the new Standard Shaders, the Mecanim system, Cameras, and the new Lighting features to hone your skills towards building 3D games to perfection. Finally, you will learn non-player character control and explore Unity 5's extra features to enhance your 3D game development skills.

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Core UI – Messages, Menus, Scores, and Timers

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 message

Displaying an image

Creating UI Buttons to move between scenes

Organizing images inside panels and changing panel depths via buttons

Displaying the value of an interactive UI Slider

Displaying a countdown timer graphically with a UI Slider

Displaying a radar to indicate the relative locations of objects

Creating UIs with the Fungus open-source dialog system

Setting custom mouse cursor images

Input Fields component for text entry

Toggles and radio buttons via Toggle Groups

Conclusion

Inventory GUIs

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 text totals

Displaying multiple pickups of the same object with multiple status icons

Revealing icons for multiple object pickups by changing the size of a tiled image

Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as a list of text via a dynamic List<> of PickUp objects

Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as text totals via a dynamic Dictionary<> of PickUp objects and "enum" pickup types

Generalizing multiple icon displays using UI Grid Layout Groups (with scrollbars!)

Conclusion

2D Animation

Introduction

Flipping a sprite horizontally

Animating body parts for character movement events

Creating a 3-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

Conclusion

Creating 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

Playing videos inside a scene

Conclusion

Using Cameras

Introduction

Creating a picture-in-picture effect

Switching between multiple cameras

Making textures from screen content

Zooming a telescopic camera

Displaying a mini-map

Creating an in-game surveillance camera

Lights and Effects

Introduction

Using lights and cookie textures to simulate a cloudy day

Adding a custom Reflection map to a scene

Creating a laser aim with Projector and Line Renderer

Reflecting surrounding objects with Reflection Probes

Setting up an environment with Procedural Skybox and Directional Light

Lighting a simple scene with Lightmaps and Light Probes

Conclusion

Controlling 3D 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

Organizing States into Sub-state Machines

Transforming the Character Controller via script

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

Positions, Movement and Navigation for Character GameObjects

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 – find the nearest (or a random) spawn point

Choosing destinations – respawn to the most recently passed checkpoint

NPC NavMeshAgent to seek or flee destination while avoiding obstacles

NPC NavMeshAgent to follow the waypoints in a sequence

Controlling the object group movement through flocking

Conclusion

Playing and Manipulating Sounds

Introduction

Matching the audio pitch to the animation speed

Simulating acoustic environments with Reverb Zones

Preventing an Audio Clip from restarting if it is already playing

Waiting for audio to finish playing before auto-destructing an object

Adding volume control with Audio Mixers

Making a dynamic soundtrack with Snapshots

Balancing in-game audio with Ducking

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 folder

Saving and loading player data – using static properties

Saving and loading player data – using PlayerPrefs

Saving screenshots from the game

Setting up a leaderboard using PHP/MySQL

Loading game data from a text file map

Managing Unity project code using Git version control and GitHub hosting

Publishing for multiple devices via Unity Cloud

Improving Games with Extra Features and Optimization

Introduction

Pausing the game

Implementing slow motion

Preventing your game from running on unknown servers

State-driven behavior Do-It-Yourself states

State-driven behavior using the State Design pattern

Reducing the number of objects by destroying objects at death a time

Reducing the number of enabled objects by disabling objects whenever possible

Reducing the number of active objects by making objects inactive 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

Evaluating performance by measuring max and min frame rates (FPS)

Identifying performance bottlenecks with the Unity performance Profiler

Identifying performance "bottlenecks" with Do-It-Yourself performance profiling

Cache GameObject and component references to avoid expensive lookups

Improving performance with LOD groups

Improving performance through reduced draw calls by designing for draw call batching

Conclusion

Editor Extensions

Introduction

An editor extension to allow pickup type (and parameters) to be changed at design time via a custom Inspector UI

An editor extension to add 100 randomly located copies of a prefab with one menu click

A progress bar to display proportion completed of Editor extension processing

An editor extension to have an object-creator GameObject, with buttons to instantiate different pickups at cross-hair object location in scene

Conclusion

Index

Customer Reviews

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Creating a message that fades away

Sometimes, we want a message to display just for a certain time, and then fade away and disappear, which will appear as shown in this screenshot:

Getting ready

This recipe adapts the first recipe in this chapter, so make a copy of that project to work on for this recipe.

For this recipe, we have prepared the script that you need in a folder named Scripts in the 1362_01_04 folder.

How to do it...

To display a text message that fades away, follow these steps:

Import the provided C# script class called CountdownTimer.
Ensure that GameObject Text-hello is selected in the Hierarchy tab. Then, attach an instance of the CountdownTimer C# script class as a component of this GameObject.

Create a C# script class, FadeAway, containing the following code, and add an instance as a scripted component to the GameObject Text-hello:

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using UnityEngine.UI;

public class FadeAway : MonoBehaviour {
  private CountdownTimer countdownTimer;
  private Text textUI;
  private int fadeDuration = 5;
  private bool fading = false;

  void Start (){
    textUI = GetComponent<Text>();
    countdownTimer = GetComponent<CountdownTimer>();

    StartFading(fadeDuration);
  }

  void Update () {
    if(fading){
      float alphaRemaining = countdownTimer.GetProportionTimeRemaining();
      print (alphaRemaining);
      Color c = textUI.material.color;
      c.a = alphaRemaining;
      textUI.material.color = c;

      // stop fading when very small number
      if(alphaRemaining < 0.01)
        fading = false;
    }
  }

  public void StartFading (int timerTotal){
    countdownTimer.ResetTimer(timerTotal);
    fading = true;
  }
}

When you run the scene, you will now see that the message on the screen slowly fades away, disappearing after 5 seconds.

How it works...

An instance of the provided CountdownTimer script class was added as a component to the GameObject Text-hello.

You added to the GameObject Text-hello an instance of the scripted class, FadeAway. The Start()method caches references to the Text and CountdownTimer components in the countdownTimer and textUI variables. Then, it calls the StartFading(…)method, passing in the number 5, so that the message will have faded to invisible after 5 seconds.

The StartFading(…) method starts this timer scripted component to countdown to the given number of seconds. It also sets the fading Boolean flag variable to true.

The Update() method, in each frame, tests if the fading variable is true. If it is true, then the alpha (transparency) component of the color of the Text-hello object is set to a value between 0.0 and 1.0, based on the proportion of the time remaining in the CountdownTimer object. Finally, if the proportion of time remaining is less than a very small value (0.01), then the fading variable is set to false (to save the processing work since the text is now invisible).

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Current Title:

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Creating a message that fades away

Getting ready

How to do it...

How it works...