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)

How it works...

This recipe illustrated how the XRI Interaction Toolkit offers a simulated VR device that will map keyboard and mouse movements from our computer into right/left-hand controller actions. By importing the Mock HMD device assets and adding a prefab GameObject to our scene, we are able to run and test our VR project on our computer, without the need for an actual VR headset. This can be useful when no headset is available, or we are testing aspects of the project that don't need full user testing in an actual VR environment. In many cases, it will be much faster to just use this simulated device and run a scene in Unity than building an app and testing on a headset, or even using a Link cable/Wi-Fi and having to put on/take off a VR headset each time some aspect of a scene needs testing.

Of course, there will be many situations that can only be tested properly by running them on an actual VR device, but this Mock HMD device is a useful tool to have in any VR developer...