Book Image

Unity 5.x Cookbook

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Unity 5.x Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Spreading long computations over several frames with coroutines


Optimization principal 3: Call methods as few times as possible.

Coroutines allow us to write asynchronous code—we can ask a method to go off and calculate something, but the rest of the game can keep on running without having to wait for that calculation to end. Or, we can call a coroutine method for each frame from Update() and organize the method to complete part of a complex calculation each time it is called.

Note that coroutines are not threads, but they are very handy in that each can progress each frame further. It also allows us to write code that does not have to wait for certain methods to complete before another can begin.

When games start requiring complex computations, such as for artificial intelligence reasoning, it may not be possible to maintain acceptable game performance when trying to complete all calculations in a single frame—this is where coroutines can be an excellent solution.

This recipe illustrates how...