Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2-23.
Breaking down environment pieces into Prefabs
Step 9: Scene Building
When you've imported all relevant assets and established all Prefabs, it's usually a good time to
start building your scene. Both Mesh assets and Prefabs will inevitably form the raw materials and
ingredients from which scene geometry is made. When inserting the first environment piece (whether a
mesh or a Prefab), I typically use the Transform properties in the Object Inspector to position it exactly
at the world origin, unless there's a strong overriding reason not to do so. Doing this is not essential,
of course, as you can effectively position your meshes anywhere. But starting at the world origin and
building outward adds a certain degree of neatness and cleanliness to your mesh positions and scene
limits. This might at first seem a trivial preoccupation, but investing time upfront for good organization
and a desire for tidiness like this helps make development smoother. Ideally, development
should
smoothly flow along from beginning to end, each step logically and reasonably following the previous.
Note
By level building from the origin and working outward, you can even improve performance on some
platforms, such as mobile devices.
Once you've established a first piece in the scene, you can simply add your other pieces onto it,
repeating this procedure until your level is fully constructed as desired. For CMOD, I constructed the
scene in an ad-lib way: just adding different pieces together until I arrived at a design that felt right.
