Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development

By : Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo
Book Image

Hands-On Unity 2020 Game Development

By: Nicolas Alejandro Borromeo

Overview of this book

Over the years, the Unity game engine has extended its scope from just being about creating video games to building AR/VR experiences, complex simulations, real-time realistic rendering, films, and serious games for training and education. Its features for implementing gameplay, graphics, and customization using C# programming make Unity a comprehensive platform for developing professional-level, rich experiences. With this book, you'll be able to build impressive Unity projects in a step-by-step manner and apply your knowledge of Unity concepts to create a real-world game. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to develop your first complete game using a variety of Unity tools. As you make progress, you'll learn how to make the most of the Unity Editor and create scripts using the C# programming language. This Unity game development book will then take you through integrating graphics, sound, and animations and manipulating physics to create impressive mechanics for your games. You'll also learn how to code a simple AI agent to challenge the user and use profiling tools to ensure that the code runs in a performant way. Finally, you'll get to grips with Unity's AR Foundation for creating AR experiences for 3D apps and games. By the end of this book, you'll have developed a complete game and will have built a solid foundation using Unity's tooling ecosystem to develop game projects of any scale.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
20
Chapter 20: Building the Project

Creating complex simulations with VFX Graph

The particle system we have used so far is called Shuriken, and it handles all calculations in the CPU. This has both pros and cons. A pro is that it can run on all possible devices that Unity supports, regardless of their capabilities (all of them have CPUs), but a con is that we can exceed CPU capabilities easily if we are not cautious with the number of particles we emit. Modern games require more complex particle systems to generate believable effects, and this kind of CPU-based particle system solution has started to reach its limits. This is where the VFX Graph comes in:

Figure 7.33 – On the left, a massive particle system, and on the right, an example of a VFX Graph

VFX Graph (Visual Effects Graph) is a GPU-based particle system solution, meaning that the system is executed on the video card instead of the CPU. That's because video cards are far more efficient at executing lots and lots of little...