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Extending Unity with Editor Scripting

Extending Unity with Editor Scripting

By : Angelo R Tadres Bustamante
4.7 (7)
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Extending Unity with Editor Scripting

Extending Unity with Editor Scripting

4.7 (7)
By: Angelo R Tadres Bustamante

Overview of this book

One of Unity's most powerful features is the extensible editor it has. With editor scripting, it is possible to extend or create functionalities to make video game development easier. For a Unity developer, this is an important topic to know and understand because adapting Unity editor scripting to video games saves a great deal of time and resources. This book is designed to cover all the basic concepts of Unity editor scripting using a functional platformer video game that requires workflow improvement. You will commence with the basics of editor scripting, exploring its implementation with the help of an example project, a level editor, before moving on to the usage of visual cues for debugging with Gizmos in the scene view. Next, you will learn how to create custom inspectors and editor windows and implement custom GUI. Furthermore, you will discover how to change the look and feel of the editor using editor GUIStyles and editor GUISkins. You will then explore the usage of editor scripting in order to improve the development pipeline of a video game in Unity by designing ad hoc editor tools, customizing the way the editor imports assets, and getting control over the build creation process. Step by step, you will use and learn all the key concepts while creating and developing a pipeline for a simple platform video game. As a bonus, the final chapter will help you to understand how to share content in the Asset Store that shows the creation of custom tools as a possible new business. By the end of the book, you will easily be able to extend all the concepts to other projects.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
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11
Index

Summary

In this chapter, we introduced you to the editor scripting API and also the project that we will use in this book.

With editor scripts, we were able to customize how Unity works and customize the workflow based on our specific requirements.

When you work with editor scripts, remember to use the UnityEditor namespace and save the scripts inside a folder with the name Editor.

If for some reason you must use the editor scripting API outside an Editor folder, remember to use the directives #if and #endif with the UNITY_EDITOR conditional compilation symbol to exclude that part of the code in the video game build.

If you plan to create a custom tool in your project, always consider these two things:

  • When you design a tool, always consider the user for whom you are building the tool and involve them in the design and creation process. If your tool requires a custom GUI, creating mockups is always a good alternative to get an idea of the final result. Remember, there is nothing worse than a tool that is not easy to use and doesn't solve the specific problem.
  • Always evaluate the cost of creating the tool and the time you want to invest in that. Ensure that the time and resources you spend creating the tool itself to save more time and resources later during development.

In the next chapter, we will continue working on the Level Creator, integrating the use of gizmos to display a grid meant to be used as guides in our tool.

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