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)

Using UI Grid Layout Groups to automatically populate a panel

So far, the recipes in this chapter have been hand-crafted for each situation. While this is fine, more general and automated approaches to inventory UIs can sometimes save time and effort but still achieve visual and usability results of equal quality.

There can be a lot of dragging slots from the Hierarchy window into arrays, such as in the previous recipe for the PlayerInventoryDisplay scripted component. This takes a bit of work (and mistakes might be made when dragging items in the wrong order or the same item twice). Also, if we change the number of slots, then we may have to do this all over again or try to remember to drag more slots if we increase the number. A better way of doing things is to make the first task of PlayerInventoryDisplay, at runtime, create as many of the panels for the gray-color star (or key or whatever) icon GameObjects as required children of Panel-slot-grid, and then populate the...