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)

Point-and-click raycast with user-defined, higher-cost navigation areas

Rather than indicating a desired destination by clicking an object or tile, we can use Unity's built-in Physics.Raycast(...) method to identify which Vector3 (x,y,z) position relates to the object surface in the game.

This involves translating from the 2D (x,y) screen position to an imagined 3D "ray" from the user's point of view, through the screen, into the game world, and identifying which object (polygon) it hits first.

This recipe will use Physics.Raycast to set the position of the location that's clicked on as the new destination for a NavMeshAgent controller object. The actual route that's followed can be influenced by defining navigation mesh areas of different costs. For example, walking through mud or swimming through water can have a higher cost, since they would take longer, so the AI NavMeshAgent can calculate the lowest-cost route, which may not be the shortest...