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Newbie question

Discussion in 'Getting Started' started by hockeyguy3485, Feb 15, 2019.

  1. hockeyguy3485

    hockeyguy3485

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2019
    Posts:
    2
    Hi everyone! I’m a teacher looking to try my hand at unity and want to make a basic point counting app for my use at school. I just want to be able to tally student participation points at the end of class. Does anyone have suggestions for tutorials that I should look into that would help me work towards this? I have very limited coding experience (one c++ class at uni) but am excited to learn! Thanks in advance for your help.
     
  2. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

    Joined:
    Mar 26, 2013
    Posts:
    11,847
    Unity uses C#, not C++, so start with some basics of C# tutorials (they don't need to be C# tutorials regarding Unity, just C# in general, as any Unity tutorial will assume you walk in with at least the basics of this standardized language). Then take a look at some of the tutorials in the Learn section (at the top of each page here click Learn) or 3rd party tutorials on Youtube, and walk through the Unity manual (also in the Learn section under Documentation) just to get an idea of what the engine can do for you that you don't need to reinvent the wheel for. Don't need to read the whole thing, just get familiar with the various topics unless something specifically interests you.

    As far as what to learn, you'll need to get specifically familiar with Unity's hybrid system of combining a visual editor and use of C# scripts you code in an outside code editor. Basically Unity uses "scenes" which includes everything existing in the game at that moment, in the scene editor you create/place "GameObjects" which can represent anything in your game. What they represent are defined by whatever components you want to add to them. Those components can be anything from mesh renderers to display a 3D object in the game world, to sound components to play a sound or music in 3D space, to something invisible but has one of your MonoBehaviour scripts (code you wrote in your code editor) attached that may manage some aspect of your game or application, to whatever else you may imagine. You'll want to familiarize yourself with this system, as it is core to using Unity.

    After that for your use case you'll want to move on to learning Unity's UI system. Make sure any UI tutorial your watch is for version 4.6 or later, as the Unity UI system was replaced back in 4.6 (4.6 is a long time ago, but I'm sure you could accidentally stumble upon an old tutorial for the legacy UI system somewhere, so just FYI). The UI system builds on the GameObject/Component functionality, so don't jump ahead to UI until you understand the first part.

    You're probably going to want to save some data to disk, you can use standard C# System.IO.File, Unity has a persistent data path feature you could look into, or for simple data you could look into PlayerPrefs. But I'd look at saving data after everything else above.

    Note that when doing any tutorial, it is best to run that tutorial using the same exact Unity version as the tutorial was written for, as Unity has been developing quite quickly over the last few years and subtle differences between versions can lead to errors or different than expected behavior which will be difficult for a Unity novice to quickly resolve (leading to unnecessary frustration). The differences for most major features are not too much from Unity 5, through 2017 and 2018, so whatever you learn in older versions is likely applicable to the latest/greatest. But there is nothing more frustrating than following a tutorial only to discover a menu item isn't where you expect it, an API call you are instructed to use has been replaced, or an example script has an error because it checks if running on a game console which is no longer supported.
     
    Last edited: Feb 16, 2019
  3. hockeyguy3485

    hockeyguy3485

    Joined:
    Feb 15, 2019
    Posts:
    2
    Thanks! I'll check it out.