Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game engines are central to the video games we know and love. From the artwork to the mathematics that underpin the frames onscreen, the engine calls the shots. Aside from offering one of the leading 3D game engines, Unity also provides a superlative development tool ñ a tool that can produce professional standard games for Mac, PC, and the Unity Web Player. This book is a complete exercise in game development covering environments, physics, sound, particles, and much more, to get you up and working with Unity quickly. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of developing 3D games before getting to grips with development in Unity itself. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating simple game elements you will learn everything you'll need to get started with game development for the PC, Mac, and Web. This book is designed to cover a set of easy to follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. By introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world, and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game. At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Soon you will be creating your own 3D games with ease!
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity Game Development Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Performance tweaks


In this section we will look at ways in which you can boost the performance of your game as an end product. Also known as optimization, this process is crucial to do once you have ensured that your game works as expected.

Camera Clip Planes and fog

To add a nicer visual appearance to our island, we'll enable fog. In Unity, fog can be enabled very simply and can be used in conjunction with the Camera's Far Clip Plane setting to adjust draw distance — causing objects beyond a certain distance to not be rendered. This will improve performance. By including fog, you will be able to mask the cut-off of rendering distant objects — giving a less clunky feel to exploring the island. We discussed Far Clip Plane settings in Chapter 3 when we deconstructed the First Person Controller. Now, let's adjust the value of the far plane to improve performance by cutting down the distance at which objects are still rendered by the camera.

  • Expand the First Person Controller parent group by...