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...

The opaqueness of the material that's using a Fade Shader is determined by the alpha value of its main color. This recipe is based on changing the Alpha value of the color of MeshRenderer.

There are three public variables:

  • fadeDurationSeconds: The time in seconds we want our fading to take
  • alphaStart: The initial Alpha (transparency) value we want the GameObject to start with (1 = fully visible, 0 = invisible)
  • alphaEnd: The Alpha value we want to fade the GameObject into

The UpdateMaterialAlpha(...) method updates the Alpha value of the GameObject's color object with the given value by updating the Alpha value of the fadeColor color variable and then forcing the MeshRenderer material to update its color value to match those in fadeColor.

When the scene begins, the Start() method caches a reference to the MeshRenderer component (the...