Soup To Nuts?

Hi everyone. I'm new to Unity, but have programmed for many years. When I watch the Unity tutorials, I can't help but think "this is 'how' you do a thing, but not 'why', and I think that's an important missing element. The reason I point this out is because when I read the code examples, I often find myself wrinkling my nose and thinking, "That's not how I would do this. Yes, it works, and no, you shouldn't program like that." For example, I frequently see piles of nested "if/then" starting in Update() just to see whether (or which) mouse button was clicked.

It makes sense, because you wouldn't want to overburden someone who is new to programming and Unity with concepts they might not understand. However, I am wondering if anyone has laid out a roadmap, given all the tutorials and materials available, from beginner to expert.

I poked around the site, but couldn't find what I was after, so thought perhaps someone in the community has already done so. If so, I'd be very interested!

Thanks!

 

The examples are there to show how to use the API, if you can understand them enough to say "I wouldn't do it like that" then you should be able to apply the example to your own methods of doing things.

There's not really a beginner to expert collage of materials. The Learn section does categorize things in that way, so maybe that's a good place to look.

 

You are correct. I was thinking less about myself than about others, who may be coming into Unity with no experience, and may take the examples in the tutorials as gospel, and may not ever realize there are tidier ways to approach certain things.

As another example, I read part of a book on C# and Unity, and in that book, the author explained how to update a "score" UI object, and of course it was done in Update(). At the end of the chapter, the author took half a page to explain that it was not the right way to do it, but then declined to suggest how that might be done (whereas I immediately thought "I could do this with a delegate in 4 lines").

The reason I was wondering if such a roadmap already existed is so that I might go review all of the available tutorials, and try to put them in a logical order for someone to follow from beginning to end, because "in the order they appear" will undoubtedly leave newcomers feeling a bit lost. Not a criticism, just an observation, in the event someone might benefit from the effort.

 

Yeah, it's definitely a thin line. One side being simple to understand but not best practice while the other side is best practice but much more complicated to understand. A lot of it is personal preference as well.

AFAIK there isn't a straightforward, comparable resource for those differences. I do believe there are some larger tutorial series that will explain things simply and go back later to backtrack and correct them once better concepts are covered. BergZerg comes to mind but is fairly old so I'm not sure how valid it is anymore, I know there are at least a few other series with 20+ videos/articles floating around but I've never perused them.

 

Check out the Unite videos. There are some very good ones with some useful best practices.

As far as I'm aware no comprehensive guide to become a Unitu expert exits. Plenty of stuff to become an I termediate user from a beginner. But not much to bridge the gap to expert.

It doesn't help much that A lot of the expert techniques are very game specific.

 

shameless plug: since you already know how to program you might want to checkout Unity in Action https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/161729232X

I'm a professional game programmer, and I wrote the book I wish had existed when I was learning Unity.