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 the GameObject's alpha as our starting alpha value

It may be that the game designer has set the alpha value of a GameObject in the Inspector window to the initial value they want. So, let's enhance our code to allow this to be indicated by checking a public Boolean flag variable in the Inspector window and adding code to read and use the GameObject's alpha if that option is chosen.

Do the following:

  1. In the Inspector window, click Color picker for the Albedo material and set the Alpha value to something other than 255 (for example, set it to 32, which is almost transparent):
Figure 5.21  Setting Rendering Mode of a material to Fade
  1. Add a new public Boolean variable to our script (default to false):
public bool useMaterialAlpha = false; 
  1. Add logic to the Start() method so that if this flag is true, we use the Alpha value of the color that was read from...