Unity Engine Basics - Game Character Creation with Blender and Unity - page 218

Understanding Unity's Logic and Interface
Years ago, game engines were most often developed as internal tools for game studios.
Many of these studios, consisting of former game hackers or modders, released their
engines to their games' fan bases so they could create their own content. Although this
was great for do-it-yourself developers, these engines were far from consumer-ready and
user-friendly products.
Enter the Unity game engine. Unity is somewhat unique in that it does not come pack-
aged with one specific game in the same way something like Unreal Development Kit would.
Rather, it is an engine developed to create many different types of games while eliminating
much of the aggravation surrounding processes such as content importing and file manage-
ment. It utilizes three languages for scripting—JavaScript, C#, and Boo—that are utilized
in other fields, so the hassle of learning a proprietary scripting language is minimized.
In this section, you will get a hands-on introduction to Unity by creating a new project
and exploring its interface features.
Exploring the Interface
If you have not already done so, download and open the latest version of Unity from
www.Unity3D.com . When opening the engine, you will probably see a game and level proj-
ect already loaded into the editor—this is normal. Each new version of Unity ships with
an example project so developers can see what is possible with Unity. Leave this project
open for now. If you have already created your own project, either follow along with your
own scene or open the AngryBots demo project by choosing File b Open Project in the
Unity menu bar at the top of the screen.
This is a good time to explore Unity's interface, navigation, and gameplay tools.
When you open Unity, you will see the default screen. Figure 9.1 shows the Unity
interface as it appears in the free indie version of the engine. The Unity demo game proj-
ect AngryBots is shown in Figure 9.1.
This is the default Unity interface. It is broken into several views. Each view serves an
important function for the designer building a game in the engine.
The Scene View
The first and probably most eye-catching window is the Scene view, shown in Figure 9.2.
Scene view lets you see your current scene and allows you to add and move assets as
you would in a 3D content creation program like Blender. It essentially lets you build the
visual presentation of your game that the player will see.
At the top of the Scene view are a few buttons for controlling the view mode. The
Textured drop-down list allows you to adjust display mode. Options include Textured,
Wireframe, Textured With Wireframe (Tex - Wire), Render Paths, Lightmap Resolution,
and Light Probes modes.