Guide:Unity

Exmaple scripts, tricks, and other things to help you use Unity.

Getting Started

(resources for starting using unity)

Tutorials

• How to make cool stuff in Unity - A lot of people seemed fond of this one. It completely avoids coding, unlike Unity's tutorials.
• Roll-A-Ball Tutorial - I think this is the best of Unity's own tutorials, but I'd do the above first.
• How to make a simple Walking Simulator style game - Good intro to quickly getting together a playable thing!

Interface

...

Lighting

Shadows

Sometiems you may notice that shadows far from the camera are not drawn. A resource intensive way to get round this is to go to Edit>Project Settings>Quality, and change the 'Shadow Distance' property.

Exporting

Though exporting from Unity is a pretty straightforward process, there are a lot of optional things, and some platform-specific things to take into account.

File Size

Unity isn't perfect at reducing the size of exported games, but this video has some tips: Reduce your Unity Build Size with some quick shrinking Tips (mobile, windows, etc)

The big one I learnt from that is checking the editor log to get details about what is taking up space.

Options

Icons

You can add custom icons to your games and enter your name by

Platform Notes

Linux

For exporting to Linux you should make sure you use the Universal option. Unlike Windows Linux does not automatically run 32bit executable files without installing extra stuff. If someone's into games they have probably already done this, but it's good to factor in all circumstances. If you have a README you may want to mention that a Linux user will have to make the game executable by using chmod +x and then, when running it include a ./before the file name.

So their terminal should look something like this:

$ chmod +x examplegame.x86_64
$ ./examplegame.x86_64

Itch.io is great because it will take care of this for players, as well as keep things nice and organised and Linuxy!

If you are hiding the mouse cursor you will also need to lock it's location, otherwise, if for example you've made a first-person game with mouse = WASD controls, they will have restrictions on rotating thier view.

Mac OS

Pretty similar requirements as as Linux, in that you should lock the cursor, and use the Universal build type.

Windows

Exporting for Windows is pretty easy. 32bit builds will work on anything, but you can also include 64bit ones together or as a separate download for people that want them.

Windows builds end up with two .PDB files in their directory which are just debugging stuff and you can delete them to make your game a much smaller download (they can make it at least twice as big D: )

Importing

3-D Models

Blender

In Blender the forward direction is X and up is Z, but in Unity forward is Z and Y is up! Which means you'll get an irritating surprise when importing things! There are some solutions though:

(just dumping some links, will sort later)

• Stopping the 270 degree FBX default rotation on import
• Blender > Unity Rotation Fix
• Rotation when importing from Blender

1. When Exporting

• How to correct scale and rotation of static Blender models for Unity

2. When Importing

• FixBlenderImportRotation Editor script.

Scripting

Scripting in Unity is done in either Javascript or C#. You can mix and match them in your project. Don't worry about trying to learn either comprehensively. The main thing is knowing what to search for, and trying to understand the scripts you find online (that you will then nick, and stick in your game). Try not to worry about doing things a 'right' way, do things in the way that makes sense to you (as long as it works!)

Scripts can be a bunch of separate files, and you can attach multiple to one object with no problems.

Generally I find it useful to create an empty game object that I can attach 'general' kinda scripts to ; for things like resetting the games, for example. But you can also attach these to your player, or whereever makes sense to you.

Example scripts

• Resetting, quitting, changing scenes
• Debugging, Problem solving
• Working with text and the GUI

Colliders

Enabling and disabling

Most of the posts I found via searching say you can't just switch colliders off and on with scripting, but I guess those're all outa date because it works just fine for me!

GameObject.GetComponent(Collider).enabled = false;

Either remove GameObject. if the script's on the object with the collider you want to toggle, or use a variable (or search, etc..) to put the name of the GameObject you want to reference.

Other Methods

May as well mention the work'rounds I dug up though! They include: Deactivating the collider by enabling it as a trigger. This'll cause an 'OnTriggerEnter' state to be called rather than 'OnCollisionEnter'. Hacky, but it works!, as long as you're using a convex shaped collider

GetComponent(Collider).isTrigger = true;

Also hacky!, but you can shrink the collider down to 0 to make it impossible to actually be triggered by anything D: then resize it when needed D: And of course, if you're able to, you could disable the whole game object. Another way to use this could be to have two copies of the same object which you switch out/in.

Moving things

BallRolling.js

var force : float = 6;

function Update () {
	var h : float = Input.GetAxis("Horizontal");
	var v : float = Input.GetAxis("Vertical");
	GetComponent.<Rigidbody>().AddForce(Vector3(h, 0.0, v) * force);
} 

If you attach this to a ball, or something else roundish, you will be able to roll it round using WASD / arrow keys.

Creating and destroying objects

keepPosOnReset.js

function Awake () {
	DontDestroyOnLoad (transform.gameObject);
}

Any object you attach this script to will not have its position reset when that reset.js script is called. I used this in something yesterday where apart from walking about and pushing things (placed by me) the player is able to create blocks. I wanted everything in the scene to reset normally on pressing 'Esc' except for the objects the player themself created. So some things are persistent until the game is quit.

See Also

• Scripts section on the Unify Community Wiki.
• Unity Spaceship Tutorial.

Other Resources

• Guide:Sources#Unity - Example projects to poke round in, in the sources section of this wiki.
• Unify Community Wiki - Can be outdated, but has lots of scripts and things up there.
  • Tips page on the Unify Community Wiki.
• Unite 2015 - A Little Math for Your Big Ideas - Floating, a related watery physics.
• Unity C# Tutorials on Catlike Coding. Lots of neat, procedural stuff here.
• Newbie Guide to Unity JavaScript - I think this should be helpful to people who've never programmed before?
• HLSL shaders in the assets section.
• uninomicon.com - Wiki documenting the undocumented quirks of the Unity engine.