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 secret game codes to secure your leaderboard scripts

The Unity and PHP code that is presented illustrates a simple, unsecured web-based leaderboard. To prevent players from hacking into the board with false scores, we should encode some form of secret game code (or key) into the communications. Only update requests that include the correct code will actually cause a change to the database.

Note: The example here is an illustration using the MD5 hashing algorithm. For protecting a personal game, this is fine, but it's quite old and would not be suitable for sensitive or valuable data, such as financial or personal details. Some links to articles on more secure approaches can be found at the end of this topic.

The Unity code will combine the secret key (in this example, the harrypotter string) with something related to the communication for example, the same MySQL/PHP leaderboard may have different database records for different games that are identified with a game...