Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity 4

Hi all,

My name is Sue Blackman and the second edition of my book is finally out! As you may have guessed, the title is Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity 4 (Apress, publishers). As with the first edition, I've written this book especially for artists and designers and those of you who are new to scripting and game development in general.

The book is project based and takes you through the process of creating a first person adventure game- a genre that is very forgiving and well suited to beginning scripting. Even if adventure games aren't your final goal, you will be able to get a handle on the concepts and implementation of game logic, state management, inventory, saving/loading and other in-depth topics useful in many other types of games. The approach is to start small and add functionality a little bit time with plenty of visual feedback for your scripting efforts.

While the first book's project was a classic adventure game, this time around, I've included physics and some favorite Unity special effects as part of the interaction. With Mecanim as the foundation, the introduction of a couple of NPCs (non-player characters) and the creation of a dialog tree helps make this version more contemporary.

For those of you new to Unity, you will soon discover that Unity tends to make changes in each release that can make authoring for this great game engine, well, challenging. Bookmark this first post- I'll be adding errata, clarification, and later, changes required by new Unity releases.

I hope this book will help many of you take the next step toward that 'dream game' you've always wanted to make!

-Sue

Errata:

Page 111, steps 9-11 talk about adding a tree, "Big Tree" to the scene. In the first edition, I had people build a tree, so had them bring that package in when they first set up the project.Big Tree is included with TreeCreator.UnityPackage. It can be brought into an existing scene with Assets (the menu)>Import Assets> Tree Creator or right-click in the Project view)>Import Assets> Tree Creator

Page 113, step 1 instructs you to "Locate the Palm tree in the Project view and drag it into the Scene view".
should probably read: step 1 "Locate the Palm tree asset (blue box with paper icon), not the Palm folder, in the Project view, and drag it into the Scene view".
If you are using Two Columns Layout, the Palm image will have an open arrow on its right side

Page 117, step 10 refers to selecting "Refresh Tree and Detail Prototypes" from the Terrain menu. Unity removed the Terrain menu and spread the functionality throughout the Inspector. There is now a Refresh button next to the Edit Tree [ or Edit Details] button for trees and detail meshes, so if you change an asset (I think we adjust the Scale Factor for the Old Banyan Tree), it must be "refreshed" for the changes to be updated in the terrain.

Pagec 147 156, Appendix B was a list of the strings names of keyboard keys, Input.GetKey ("a")
A short version can now be found by searching "Input" in the Manual

Page 473, There is no resetMO variable, do not add the following 2 lines (it was left over from some de-bug test):
//reset mouseover s
if (resetMO) GUI.Box(Rect(0,0, Screen.width, Screen.height), "", customGUIStyle);
For those of you who are interested, the Box control blocks mouseovers on the 3D objects behind it. This "empty" box was set to full screen size.

 

I re-downloaded the assets but both zip programs I have still say there is an error. I sent a email to Apress support.

 

They replied and said there is no problem. In the other thread on here another person said he had problems also.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/93775-Beginning-3D-Game-Development-with-Unity/page19

The book is telling me to import assets for chapter four yet the source downloads start with chapter 7.

 

Hi Wampy,

I was able to reproduce the problem- most of the unzip was OK, but I think it is missing chapters 4-6 (which, of course are the first ones you will need...)

So I contacted my editor and she said they would have them up this weekend

if you PM me with an e-mail address, I can give you a dropbox link for the missing ones until they get the full download sorted out.


thanks for your patience!

Sue

 

Sue,

Is this book targed to developers working on a Mac or a PC (or both)? Does it use C# or UnityScript?

I'm primarily a PC developer, and I want to make sure the book would be OK for me to use. I realize Unity works on either, but that doesn't mean the book isn't heavily one or the other.

Thanks,
Harold Blackorby

 

According to the introduction, it was written using Windows 7 and 8 (and makes a note where there are differences on the Mac) so you should be fine. Looks like the code is all Javascript.

 

Great book so far! I think this will be a valuable resource in attempting to learn Unity.

Errata:

1) Page 111, steps 9-11 talk about adding a tree, "Big Tree" to the scene. This asset is not available in the Standard Assets. If the intent is to download the book files to get this, there's no mention of it, and at this point there hasn't been any info on how to go about importing the asset into a project from the files even if they were downloaded. Later on page 114 there's mention of downloading TerrainAssets.unitypackage from the store, however it appears this package is included with the Unity install and the one referenced on page 24, Terrains.unitypackage is not. So maybe thats the source of the error, i.e. Big Tree is part of Terrains not TerrainAssets which is now what is included with the install?

2) Page 117, step 10 refers to selecting "Refresh Tree and Detail Prototypes" from the Terrain menu. Not sure what that means.

The below wasn't technically Errata, but was confusing.

Page 113, step 1 instructs you to "Locate the Palm tree in the Project view and drag it into the Scene view". The Palm Tree is in Standard Assets >> Terrain Assets >> Trees Ambient-Occlusion. But dragging it into the Scene view doesn't work. After experimenting around it appears that you have to expand "Palm Tree" which is just a folder and drag the Palm Tree Import Settings inside there. When doing this is brings it in as its own game object and adds it to the hierarchy which, based on the text that follows must be the intent.

 

Hi Vorbeli,

Thanks for the errata report! I haven't received my hard copy of the book yet, so I'm struggling with the page numbers

Good catch on Big Tree!
Big Tree is included with TreeCreator.UnityPackage
It can be brought into an existing scene with Assets (the menu)>Import Assets> Tree Creator or right-click in the Project view)>Import Assets> Tree Creator
In the first edition, I had people build a tree, so had them bring that package in when they first set up the project
In the second edition, I had to cut the tree building part out and apparently forgot we needed the sample tree!

" Page 117, step 10 refers to selecting "Refresh Tree and Detail Prototypes" from the Terrain menu. Not sure what that means."
Unity removed the Terrain menu and spred the functionality throughout the Inspector
There is now a Refresh button next to the Edit Tree [ or Edit Details] button for trees and detail meshes, so if you change an asset (I think we adjust the Scale Factor for the Old Banyan Tree), it must be "refreshed" for the changes to be updated in the terrain.

Page 113, step 1 instructs you to "Locate the Palm tree in the Project view and drag it into the Scene view".
should probably read:
Page 113, step 1 "Locate the Palm tree asset (blue box with paper icon), not the Palm folder, in the Project view, and drag it into the Scene view".
If you are using Two Columns Layout, the Palm image will have an open arrow on its right side

I'll move these corrections to the first post- thanks, again!

@ Harold

As Vorbeli mentioned, I used Windows for the book. The scripts are mostly JavaScript( or Unity's version of it to be more precise)
There has been interest expressed in C# versions of the scripts, so if that is where your interest lies, I may be "converting" those

Sue

 

why it goes windowed after pressing new game
i've build it the "bug" is not in the editor

 

Edit>Project Settings>Player>Resolution and Presentation>Resolution>Default is Full Screen

there are also more settings/options there for Mac

 

Sue,

I've gotten myself to Chapter 12 and I'm slightly stuck. Under the "Activating the Action Message" subheading on page 473, you have a change to the useText nested If statement. Outside of the If statement you have,

//reset mouseover s
if (resetMO) GUI.Box(Rect(0,0, Screen.width, Screen.height), "", customGUIStyle);

Unity doesn't compile because there is not resetMO variable. I looked at your finished code for chapter 12 and it's not on that line in GameManager.js

Should this just have been removed from the 2nd edition?

 

Hi Mike,

It looks like a bit of code I may have used just to track down a bug or something (couldn't find it in version 1 either)- definitely doesn't belong there!

If you remove the "if (resetMO)" part of the line, it essentially creates an invisible "button" over the whole screen
and that control blocks mouseovers...

delete or comment out at will - I'll add it to errata

thanks!

Sue

 

Hi Sue All,

Just got my copy of "Beginning 3D Game Development with Unity 4" yesterday. Only been playing with Unity for a short time, mainly using online tutorials for Unity with C#. Decided to get the book and give it a proper go.

Have done a fair bit of application and web dev programming so I'm pretty comfortable with both Javascript and C#, not to much of a hassle to convert scripts. Which is exactly what I've been doing. Only got book yesterday so only up to Ch 3, so has been a simple matter of converting Javascript to C# as I go. Had a quick look through rest.

Sue, you mentioned you may be converting the scripts to C#. Have you been able to do any of this or is it something you'd like to do if you have the time? I only mention it as I'm doing it anyway I could send you copies, and if anyone else is doing the same thing maybe we could make it a group effort. Let me know if your interested.

Would help if I was able to get the resources though. Still having no luck downloading from Apress. Apress Server doesn't support resuming downloads so even using download manager doesn't help. 8hrs yesterday for just over 50%, then connection reset. If Apress can't provide multi-file downloads is there anywhere else the resources can be downloaded from?

Thanks

Stu

 

Hi Stu,

I just got sucked into another project, so converting to C# just fell into the "if I have time" category. I would love your help on this! A group effort sounds great too! We could find a place to make them available to other readers who are interested. As you said, a lot of the conversion is pretty straight forward, but there are places that will need a bit of explanation as well.

PM me and I'll give you the link to my dropbox folder for the assets. No project files for each chapter, but that will at least get you going. Apress just isn't set up to handle those large Unity project files gracefully.

Thanks so much for your offer- timing is perfect!

Sue

 

I just finished the Quick Publish section of chapter 6. When running the exe it shows the OS cursor along with the GUI cursor. When I run it in the Unity game window it only shows the GUI cursor. Any ideas?

 

I just made an exe of that chapter's project it works as expected. But I did glance through the chapter see where I have you create an object called "Script Holder" that holds a temporary script called "HideCursor."

Since that script uses Screen.showCursor to turn the OS cursor off and on and I don't see where I tell you to delete it once you start making the GUI cursor, I'm thinking that could be the problem.

So, if you still have a "Script Holder" object in the Hierarchy view, delete or deactivate it.
Let me know if that was the problem I'll add that to errata.

thanks,
Sue

 

I deactivated the Script Holder object and it works as expected now. I still don't understand why the problem didn't show up until I built the executable.

Thank you for the quick reply.

 

On page 147 and page 156, references are made to Appendix B. Looks like the appendices didn't make it into the printed book. Any chance of providing them online? I'm curious what A contains or if there are others beyond B

 

@ Cooter - OS cursor hide/show in the editor has always been erratic, at least in Windows
I usually need to use full screen for Play mode to see if it is really working or not
good find on that one- I'll add it to errata


@Vorbeli Ward- Appendix A was the images of a couple of shaders I built with the Strumpy Shader Editor. He's gone pretty quiet lately, so guessing we might eventually see the editor as part of Unity at some point- total speculation on my part here

Appendix B was a list of the strings names of keyboard keys, Input.GetKey ("a")
A short version can now be found by searching "Input" in the Manual

Appendix C was a list of what triggered what in the final sequence- it was rather like the grand finale of a fireworks show, where a lot of things happen in a short space of time.
Since the reader just imports the final level pretty much finished, I left it out also

So basically, in the interest of cutting way back on the page count, they weren't included, but the decision was made toward the end so hte reference to B snuch through.

Sue

 

ok, sounds like it made sense to remove them for space. Here are some more I ran across. Really enjoying the book btw, great job! Its a great learning tool!

---

p.199 - step 6, in order to be able to change the default resolution (to get the width/height fields to show up) you first have to uncheck the "Default is Fullscreen" checkbox. Otherwise the fields aren't available there to edit.

p.205, 208 - There are references to the Edit menu, Game Settings. This is actually Project Settings. Unity must have renamed it.

p.209 - When you get to this point, if you run the code the default hardware cursor will still get shown occasionally even though you're using GUI.DrawTexture now for the cursor. This is because the HideCursor script (in the ScriptHolder game object) is still there and running. Even though we're turning off the cursor at startup, HideCursor will still show it again. I think its necessary to remove this script at this point in the book so that the cursor will work properly.

p.209 - The AlmostBlankAlpha texture referenced here does not exist in the ch 6 downloaded assets. Having said that, these steps are not necessary provided you consider the above and remove the HideCursor script at this point.

p.212 - The sentence starting with, "Reading through the function, if it was passed a false...", is backwards. Its stating the logical condition opposite of what it should be which might be confusing to someone without any scripting/coding experience.

 

Chapter 9
There's talk about a LockPlate object, first in the state management charts, and later you need to add the Object Lookup script to it, problem is there's no LockPlate object. Is this me misunderstanding something or is the object missing from the assets?

 

LockPlate is an Empty GameObject with a Box collider, or a Cube with its Mesh Renderer turned off (I usually find it easier to use the latter). It is positioned over the corresponding area on the chest base so you can have something to pick in that area. In the first book, I think I had a more complex version of interaction, but simplified it in this one.

hope that helps!
Sue

 

p. 240, 243, and others - one of the animations listed in the book, "chest rattle" is missing. this is listed in table 7-1 and is also reflected in the total time mentioned p. 243 which ends up being 5 secs instead of 5.433 secs due to the missing clip. doesn't seem to cause any problems though as its not directly used later.

p. 256 refers to the pollen ball which is supposed to be part of the flower. This doesn't exist so you can't work through the steps here.

p. 261, after following these steps with the layer setup the fake shadow was still showing on the top of the rock for me. Interestingly, I was also still getting shadows on the objects from the directional light so maybe the two conflicted?

 

Pollen ball:
Flower > Bone01/02/03/04/05/06 > Bone07 > Pollen Ball

 

Page 510 (very last page of chapter 13) refers to a "Ding" sound. I can't seem to find this in any of the assets? What sound is this supposed to be?

 

I amusing a PC mouse on a mac

From page 156

If (Input.GetMouseButton ( 1 ) || Input.GetKey ("left shift") ) {

I can look around if I press the left shift, but not if I press the right mouse button. I used the code that prints when you are turning to help show me when the right button is down, and to my surprise it was saying the right mouse button was down, when I wasn't pressing it. I tried that with all three mouse buttons with the same result.

The mouse work fine in every other way in unity, and on the computer, but has some problem with my code. Any thoughts on what I am doing wrong, or way I could solve it?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

 

Hi, I'm on page 215 on the book and it keeps telling me to locate E.G: chapter 7 assets folder and import this object but i have NO clue on where the hell that is? Can you please help? I have no idea where each chapter books asset folders are.

 

You sure you got the right page number? Just read page 215 and doesn't have anything about importing assets, is also chapter 6 not 7. Ch 7 is "Imported Assets", are you some where in there?

I assume its talking about importing assets from the source code download for the book. Have you got this?

 

Hm, I'm stuck in chapter 9.
When I try to pick the Key at rock I get an error "The animation state key up could not be played because it couldn't be found" but it is there. It gets highlighted in the project view when I select it in the Inspector.

Not sure how I can fix this

P.S. great book

 

Ok I've found the issue, the "key up" animation wasn't linked in the AnimationObjects Animations-list

 

Hi Sue. Having successfully finished the first edition I'm now setting out on the second. I've got as far as page 168, Collision Walls and have a problem - I cannot get the First Person Controller to climb over the wall. I've followed the text and rotated the wall about the Z axis by 20 degrees but try as I might, jumping etc, the wall remains unclimbable. What have I done wrong?

 

Hey tholland,

What you describe is what I found at first as well, until I worked out that it didn't mean to jump the wall in one go but use jump to climb the wall, i.e. hit jump continuously raising the FPC up the wall a bit at a time, as well as moving across the face of the wall at an slight angle as Sue says in the book. Hope this helps.

Any major differences between the 1st edition and this one so far?

 

Hi guys,

Sorry for not checking in earlier- seems I wasn't getting any notifications (no idea why, but they're back again)

@Vorbeli Ward
chest rattle- apparently I have too many different versions of the chest on my machines , I may have used the rattle in the first book- I think I used a simpler version of the chest functionality this time around
PollenBall- yep, it is deep in the Flower's hierarchy (search by name is your friend)
fake shadow- good catch! Unity free now also has shadows, so I suppose I should explicitly tell all readers to turn off shadows for the directional light in the scene.

@steambucky
try this in Update to see how the mouse is getting mapped:
if (Input.GetMouseButton (0)) print("left");
if (Input.GetMouseButton (1)) print("right");
if (Input.GetMouseButton (2)) print("middle");
this is a good start to see what is going wrong

@mike274
Ding- Good catch! Not sure why I didn't include Ding.ogg with the test sounds, but the line should read "1. Select your chosen test sound asset from the Test Sounds folder".

@jakhir1
You need to download the assets for the book from the book's page on the Apress website. The single download is quite large because I've included the project files for each chapter in case people want to compare or just jump around. There should be zips for each chapter with script, assets and project folders where necessary.

@MayhemMike
glad you got that solved!

@tholland
hi Tony, Somnium is correct- holding W and repeatedly pressing jump while heading up across the wall allows the player to get over it. The point here is that players will do unexpected things in your game and this is one of them, so measures must be taken to prevent this from happening (unless, of course, it is part of the game play )

Sue

 

Thanks, Sue and Somnium; my jump finger needs more practice!

 

Hi All, I'm having trouble on page 158. The code to enable Mouse Look while Turning won't let me look up and down.

The troubling bit of code, I think, is the conditional (Input.GetButton("Turn") axes == RotationAxes.MouseY)
Honestly, I don't see how this would work. If this tests true, wouldn't it just enable full mouse look, not just about a single axis? (I don't pretend to understand all this code. )

To test, I wrote:
if(axes == RotationAxes.MouseY) print("It works!");

This statement never tests true apparently. I feel like I might have accidentally changed one of the Input settings, but all other axis and mouse look controls work as expected. Any thoughts?

 

hi Tony(#2 ),

in the conditional (Input.GetButton("Turn") axes == RotationAxes.MouseY)

"turn" is the virtual input you set up for left/right arrow keys

the MouseLookRestricted script goes on both the camera and the fpc

on the fpc, it turns the character on its Y axis (up in the world), but its RotationAxes enum is set to MouseX- because mouse X is sideways mouse movement

to keep the fpc from tipping up and down while looking up/down, the same script is put on the camera, but this time the mouse axis is set to the "up/down" mouseY- forward and backward

picture the mouse on a mouse pad with a standard graph grid on it- horizontal is X, vertical is Y


so this code says "if you are using the arrow keys to turn and the axes parameter is set to MouseY (which it is on the MouseLookRestricted script that resides on the camera), then process the code for the mouse up/down-forward/backward (on the mouse pad) input

I'm going to let you digest this check things again to see if you can spot the problem

and I think next time I need to add some "mouse pad" graphics to clarify MouseX and MouseY because I found myself getting them confused with the character X and Y regularly

Sue

 

Thanks so much Sue!

I ran through all the inputs again. I found that in Input, my Mouse Look Restricted script for MainCamera had the axes set to MouseXAndY (should be MouseY, of course) Changed this back and the mouse look up and down works perfect and my console is exploding with "It works!"

For the record, I found the mouse axis explanations very clear in the book. That's why I was so baffled. User error, again :wink:
Thanks for the great book and for being so attentive to our questions!

 

Hi Sue!
I am looking forward to reading you book that I just ordered online. However I am looking around trying to find the assets that the book uses. Do the assets come with the book, or is there a website?

Thanks!
Connor Kelly

 

check the book's page on the Apress website- you may need to answer a question or something from the book to gain access

the download is 2+ gb (it contains the project files for each chapter along with finished scripts and assets)

 

Thanks for the quick reply! I just downloaded the files and it seems they come as a rar file? How does that work in unity?

 

I'm having a small problem with the key at rock not disappearing when it rises even though the alpha goes to 0. I notice that for that material (bumped specular) the alpha channel is actually used for the glossiness. Can that be causing the problem?

I actually started with the first edition and have now moved to second edition. Can that be an issue? Still using first edition assets I think.

 

RAR is a compressed format like ZIP. Most compression software should be able to unpack it.

 

for transparency to animate, you must use the Transparent shaders, in this case, Transparent Bumped Specular

Pretty sure that's in there (probably shortly after you discover it didn't work with original shader...)

 

Thanks, that fixed it. Now on to the hardcore stuff - Chapter 9

 

Thanks! Any idea what software I should use?

 

I'm on a PC and use 7-Zip which is free. I'm not sure what the options are for Mac. If you have 7-Zip installed just right click the RAR file and it will give an option to extract.

 

Thanks for your help earlier 3d Junkie - time for my next question

In Cursor Control on page 208 -209 steps 1 to 10. Which script should i be putting these changes into? Is this all meant to go in the HideCursor script?

 

Hi Sue. I've to page 258 (Static objects and shadows). I have followed your coding thus far and all be objects generate shadows thanks to the light mapping process you explain on page 132ff. I don't understand why blob shadows are needed as well.

 

Working through Chapter 9. I'm wondering why the lid and the lock plate both have a locked state, as they are the same on each. Isn't this redundant?

 

I put this code in the GameManager script and it seems to have worked.