Book Image

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials

By : Will Goldstone
Book Image

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials

By: Will Goldstone

Overview of this book

Game Engines such as Unity are the power-tools behind the games we know and love. Unity is one of the most widely-used and best loved packages for game development and is used by everyone, from hobbyists to large studios, to create games and interactive experiences for the web, desktop, mobile, and console. With Unity’s intuitive, easy to learn toolset and this book – it’s never been easier to become a game developer. 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 – prototyping a simple scenario, and then creating a larger game. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating game mechanics you will learn everything you’ll need to get started with game development. 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. All of the concepts taught in this book are applicable to other types of game, however, 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 (21 chapters)
Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Optimizing performance


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—ensuring that your player has the best possible experience from your game. Covered here are some of the basics you should be aware of, but you should also understand that Optimization is a broad topic that you will need to dig deeper into once you have more experience with Unity.

Camera Clip Planes and Fog

To add a nicer visual appearance to our island, we will 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. This means that we...