Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Shaun Ferns
Book Image

Unity 2021 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Shaun Ferns

Overview of this book

If you are a Unity developer looking to explore the newest features of Unity 2021 and recipes for advanced challenges, then this fourth edition of Unity Cookbook is here to help you. With this cookbook, you’ll work through a wide variety of recipes that will help you use the essential features of the Unity game engine to their fullest potential. You familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graph before exploring animation features to enhance your skills in building games. As you progress, you will gain insights into Unity's latest editor, which will help you in laying out scenes, tweaking existing apps, and building custom tools for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) experiences. The book will also guide you through many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques, teaching you how to communicate with database-driven websites and process XML and JSON data files. By the end of this Unity book, you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of Unity game development and built your development skills. The easy-to-follow recipes will earn a permanent place on your bookshelf for reference and help you build better games that stay true to your vision.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Free Chapter
2
Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs
3
Inventory and Advanced UIs
6
2D Animation and Physics
13
Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More
15
Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR)
Navigation Meshes and Agents

Unity provides navigation meshes (NavMeshes) and artificial intelligence (AI) agents that can plan pathways and move objects along those calculated paths. Pathfinding is a classic AI task, and Unity has provided game developers with fast and efficient pathfinding components that work out of the box.

Having objects that can automatically plot and follow paths from their current location to the desired destination point (or a moving object) provides the components for many different kinds of interactive game characters and mechanics. For example, we can create point-and-click games by clicking on a location or object, toward which we wish one or more characters to travel. Or, we can have enemies that "wake up" when our player's character is nearby, and move toward (seek) our player, then perhaps going into combat or dialogue...