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...

When you create a Unity UI DropDown GameObject, it comes with several components and child GameObjects automatically – Label, Arrow, and Template (as well as ViewPort and Scrollbar, and so on). Dropdowns work by duplicating the Template GameObject for each of the options listed in the Dropdown (Script) component. Both the Text and Sprite image values can be given for each option. The properties of the Template GameObject are used to control the visual style and behavior of the dropdown's thousands of possible settings.

First, you replaced the default options (Option A, Option B, and so on) in the Dropdown (Script) component. You then created a C# script class called DropdownManager that, when attached to your Dropdown and having its PrintNewValue method registered for On Value Changed events, means that we can see the Integer index of the option each time the user changes their choice. Item index values start counting at zero (as with many computing items), so 0 for the first item, 1 for the second item, and so on.

Since the default Dropdown GameObject that was created includes a Scroll Rect (Script) component and a Scrollbar child GameObject, when you reduced the height of Template, you could still scroll through the options. You then removed these items so that your dropdown didn't have a scrolling feature anymore.