Unity 2018 Cookbook

By : Matt Smith, Francisco Queiroz

3.7 (3)

Buy this Book

Unity 2018 Cookbook

3.7 (3)

By: Matt Smith, Francisco Queiroz

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

With the help of the Unity 2018 Cookbook, you’ll discover how to make the most of the UI system and understand how to animate both 2D and 3D characters and game scene objects using Unity's Mecanim animation toolsets. Once you’ve got to grips with the basics, you will familiarize yourself with shaders and Shader Graphs, followed by understanding the animation features to enhance your skills in building fantastic games. In addition to this, you will discover AI and navigation techniques for nonplayer character control and later explore Unity 2018’s newly added features to improve your 2D and 3D game development skills. This book provides many Unity C# gameplay scripting techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have gained comprehensive knowledge in game development with Unity 2018.

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

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Free Chapter

Displaying Data with Core UI Elements

Introduction

Displaying a "Hello World" UI text message

Displaying a digital clock

Displaying a digital countdown timer

Creating a message that fades away

Displaying a perspective 3D Text Mesh

Creating sophisticated text with TextMeshPro

Displaying an image

Creating UIs with the Fungus open source dialog system

Creating a Fungus character dialog with images

Responding to User Events for Interactive UIs

Introduction

Creating UI Buttons to move between scenes

Animating button properties on mouse-over

Organizing image panels and changing panel depths via buttons

Displaying the value of an interactive UI Slider

Displaying a countdown timer graphically with a UI Slider

Setting custom mouse cursors for 2D and 3D GameObjects

Setting custom mouse cursors for UI controls

Interactive text entry with an Input Field

Toggles and radio buttons via Toggle Groups

Creating text and image icon UI Dropdown menus

Displaying a radar to indicate the relative locations of objects

Inventory UIs

Introduction

Creating a simple 2D mini-game – SpaceGirl

Displaying single object pickups with carrying and not-carrying text

Displaying single object pickups with carrying and not-carrying icons

Displaying multiple pickups of the same object with multiple status icons

Using panels to visually outline the inventory UI area and individual items

Creating a C# inventory slot UI display scripted component

Using UI Grid Layout Groups to automatically populate a panel

Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as a list of text via a dynamic List<> of scripted PickUp objects

Displaying multiple pickups of different objects as text totals via a dynamic Dictionary<> of PickUp objects and enum pickup types

Playing and Manipulating Sounds

Introduction

Playing different one-off sound effects with a single AudioSource component

Playing and controlling different sounds each with their own AudioSource component

Creating just-in-time AudioSource components at runtime through C# scripting

Delaying before playing a sound

Preventing an Audio Clip from restarting if it is already playing

Waiting for the audio to finish playing before auto-destructing an object

Creating a metronome through the precise scheduling of sounds with dspTime

Matching the audio pitch to the animation speed

Simulating acoustic environments with Reverb Zones

Adding volume control with Audio Mixers

Making a dynamic soundtrack with Snapshots

Balancing in-game audio with Ducking

Audio visualization from sample spectral data

Synchronizing simultaneous and sequential music to create a simple 140 bpm music-loop manager

Creating Textures, Maps, and Materials

Introduction

Creating a basic material with Standard Shader (Specular setup)

Adapting a basic material from Specular setup to Metallic

Applying Normal maps to a Material

Adding Transparency and Emission maps to a material

Highlighting materials at mouse-over

Adding Detail maps to a material

Fading the transparency of a material

Shader Graphs and Video Players

Introduction

Playing videos by manually adding a VideoPlayer component to a GameObject

Using scripting to control video playback on scene textures

Using scripting to play a sequence of videos back-to-back

Creating and using a simple Shader Graph

Creating a glow effect with Shader Graph

Toggling a Shader Graph color glow effect through C# code

Using Cameras

Introduction

Creating the basic scene for this chapter

Creating a picture-in-picture effect

Switching between multiple cameras

Making textures from screen content

Zooming a telescopic camera

Displaying a minimap

Creating an in-game surveillance Camera

Working with Unity's multi-purpose camera rig

Using Cinemachine ClearShot to switch cameras to keep the player in shot

Letting the player switch to a Cinemachine FreeLook camera

Lights and Effects

Introduction

Directional Light with cookie Texture to simulate a cloudy day

Creating and applying a cookie texture to a spotlight

Adding a custom Reflection map to a scene

Creating a laser aim with a projector

Enhancing the laser aim with a Line Renderer

Setting up an environment with Procedural Skybox and Directional Light

Reflecting surrounding objects with Reflection Probes

Using Material Emission to bake light from a glowing lamp onto scene objects

Lighting a simple scene with Lightmaps and Light Probes

2D Animation

Introduction

Flipping a sprite horizontally – the DIY approach

Flipping a sprite horizontally – using Animator State Chart and Transitions

Animating body parts for character movement events

Creating a three-frame animation clip to make a platform continually animate

Making a platform start falling once stepped on using a Trigger to move animation from one state to another

Creating animation clips from sprite sheet sequences

Creating a platform game with Tiles and Tilemaps

Creating a game with the 2D Gamekit

3D Animation

Introduction

Configuring a character's Avatar and idle animation

Moving your character with root motion and Blend Trees

Mixing animations with Layers and Masks

Organizing States into Sub-state Machines

Transforming the Character Controller via scripts

Adding rigid props to animated characters

Using Animation Events to throw an object

Applying Ragdoll physics to a character

Rotating the character's torso to aim a weapon

Creating geometry with Probuilder

Creating a game with the 3D Gamekit

Importing third-party 3D models and animations from Mixamo

Webserver Communication and Online Version-Control

Introduction

Setting up a leaderboard using PHP and a database

Unity game communication with web-server leaderboard

Creating and cloning a GitHub repository

Adding a Unity project to a local Git repository, and pushing files up to GitHub

Unity project version-control using GitHub for Unity

Preventing your game from running on unknown servers

Controlling and Choosing Positions

Introduction

Player control of a 2D GameObject (and limiting the movement within a rectangle)

Player control of a 3D GameObject (and limiting the movement within a rectangle)

Choosing destinations – finding a random spawn point

Choosing destinations – finding the nearest spawn point

Choosing destinations – respawning to the most recently passed checkpoint

Moving objects by clicking on them

Firing projectiles in the direction of movement

Navigation Meshes and Agents

Introduction

NPC to travel to destination while avoiding obstacles

NPC to seek or flee from a moving object

Point-and-click move to object

Point-and-click move to tile

Point-and-click Raycast with user-defined higher-cost Navigation Areas

NPC NavMeshAgent to follow waypoints in a sequence

Controlling object group movement through flocking

Creating a movable NavMesh Obstacle

Design Patterns

Introduction

State-driven behavior DIY states

State-driven behavior using the State Design Pattern

State-driven behavior with Unity Scriptable Objects

Publisher-Subscriber pattern C# delegates and events

Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern

Editor Extensions and Immediate Mode GUI (IMGUI)

Introduction

Menu items to log messages and clear the console

Displaying a panel with text data

An interactive panel with persistent storage

Creating GameObjects, parenting, and registering Undo actions

Working with selected objects and deactivating menu items

Menu item to create 100 randomly positioned prefab clones

A progress bar to display proportion completed of Editor extension processing

An editor extension to allow pickup type (and parameters) to be changed at design time via a custom Inspector UI

An editor extension to have an object-creator GameObject, with buttons to instantiate different pickups at cross-hair object location in scene

Extensible class-based code architecture to manage complex IMGUIs

Working with External Resource Files and Devices

Introduction

Loading external resource files – using Unity Default Resources

Loading external resource files by downloading files from the internet

Loading external resource files by manually storing files in the Unity  Resources or StreamingAssets folders

Saving Project files into Unity Asset Bundles

Loading resources from Unity Asset Bundles

Working with Plain Text, XML, and JSON Text Files

Introduction

Loading external text files using the TextAsset public variable

Loading external text files using C# file streams

Saving external text files with C# file streams

Loading and parsing external XML

Creating XML text data manually using XMLWriter

Saving and loading XML text data automatically through serialization

Creating XML text files – saving XML directly to text files with XMLDocument.Save()

Creating JSON strings from individual objects and lists of objects

Creating individual objects and Lists of objects from JSON strings

Virtual Reality and Extra Features

Introduction

Saving screenshots from the game

Saving and loading player data – using static properties

Saving and loading player data – using PlayerPrefs

Loading game data from a text file map

UI Slider to change game quality settings

Pausing the game

Implementing slow motion

Using Gizmo to show the currently selected object in a scene panel

Editor snap-to grid drawn by Gizmo

Creating a VR project

Adding 360-degree videos to a VR project

Working with VR content inside a VR environment – the XR Editor

Automated Testing

Introduction

Generating a default test script class

A simple unit test

Parameterizing tests with a data provider method

Unit testing a simple health script class

Creating and executing a unit test in Play mode

PlayMode testing a door animation

PlayMode and Unit Testing a player health bar with events, logging, and exceptions

Bonus Chapters

Working with External Resource Files and Devices

Working with Plain Text, XML, and JSON Text Files

Virtual Reality and Extra Features

Automated Testing

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Using panels to visually outline the inventory UI area and individual items

We see four kinds of objects when playing a game:

GameObjects that have some visual elements, such as 2D and 3D objects.
UI elements located in World Space, so they appear next to GameObjects in the scene.
UI elements located in Screen Space - Camera, so they appear at a fixed distance from the camera (but can be obscured by GameObjects closer to the camera than these UI elements).
UI elements located in Screen Space - Overlay. These always appear above the other three kinds of visual element, and are perfect for Head Up Display (HUD) elements, such as inventories.

Sometimes we want to visually make it clear which elements are part of the UI HUD and which are visual objects in the scene. Unity UI Panels with an opaque or translucent background image are a simple and effective way to achieve this.