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)
Advanced Topics - Gizmos, Automated Testing, and More

This chapter will put together four sets of advanced recipes:

  • Gizmos
  • Saving and loading game data
  • Automated testing
  • An introduction to Unity Python

Let's take a look at each in this introduction!

Gizmos

Gizmos are another kind of Unity editor customization. Gizmos are visual aids for game designers that are provided in the Scene window. They can be useful as setup aids (to help us know what we are doing) or for debugging (understanding why objects aren't behaving as expected).

Gizmos are not drawn through Editor scripts, but as part of the Monobehaviour class, so they only work for GameObjects in the current scene. Gizmo drawing is usually performed in two methods:

  • OnDrawGizmos(): This is executed every frame or editor window repaint, for every GameObject in the Hierarchy window.
  • OnDrawGizmosSelect(): This is executed...