Sources about Best practices for development with the Unity engine

Hey there!

I'm a computer science student and I want to learn more about the Unity Game Engine, so I decided to write my scientific literary work about the topic I mentioned in the title.

Was just wondering if someone knows some suitable books, e-books, papers or articles I could use for that.

Greetings!

 

Unity Engine is fast peaced changing software, considering for book lifetime. Any book about the Unity Engine would become nearly obsolete in few years.

Maybe there are some, but I doubt if they are any up to date. Unless you don't mind writing about older engine version. Which I supose you don't for accede mic purposes.

Source code, docs, internet, forum, discord, YouTube etc, are you best resources for quoting and referencing.

 

Do you want to write about the sources providing these best practices, or the best practices themselves?

Is that work for your university degree? If so, "Unity best practices" is too generic in my opinion. You may want to pick a topic (Unity feature) with a more narrow focus so you can go really in-depth, such as benefits and coding practices of Entities/Jobs/Burst (DOTS).

And avoid trying to write about "best practices" because this is really difficult to assess, many have opinions in wildly different directions, some best practices only work in certain scenarios or don't scale or won't work well with certain game architectures or genres, and so on.

 

Unity has some good resources that may be useful to you.

To start with have a look at the How To section, which includes articles and ebooks. Its a long page and on mobile you may not be shown the subsection menu, so make sure to scroll all the way through it.

For specific e-books

• Ultimate guide to profiling Unity games
• Create a C# code style guide
• Optimize your game performance for mobile
• Unity gamedev field guide
• Optimize your console and PC game performance
• Increase productivity with Unity 2020 LTS
• Version control and project organization best practices for game developers
• Level up your programming with game programming patterns

 

my personal idea is to develop in Built-In and then possibly consider upgrade to URP or HDRP
after ENTIRE GAME is 1.0

because URP and HDRP are additional features

KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid!

idk thats my approach in this context

 

I highly recommend against this if you're on the fence for HDPR. I'm not as familiar with URP when it comes to the changes that need to be made to move from built-in but HDRP will require you to recreate most of your art assets from their source materials and your shaders will have to be remade. Absolutely nothing about this idea is KISS.

 

it is cause HDRP is just extra features, its not integral to the functionality of the gameplay, and I recreate art assets all the time from HDRP and URP to Built-In lols ... also Better Lit by Jason Booth , and The Vegetation Engine by Boxophobic makes conversions easier
see this post its good : Ghosthowl Mar31 2022 https://forum.unity.com/threads/convert-hdrp-to-lwrp.724058/

also Iam working on a write-up for conversions

...
its KISS cause i been working with Unity since 2014 and I totally ignored learning how to do anything with URP or HDRP lol .. cause its just extra graphics fluff
and everything I read people say (chitchat word of mouth bs) they all diss on URP and HDRP

but yeah I get what u sayin

..its my understanding that URP and HDRP are not yet fully functional?

 

The last doc in Noisecrime's post is what corporate C# developers will want to look at. That's the world I come from.

• Level up your programming with game programming patterns

The code examples in there are VERY good and the pattern descriptions are also excellent (and concise, books on software patterns, errr, "tomes", can be very long). Grasping the content is left to the beholder. Thanks for that link.

The paradigm of "per frame" code is a tricky one, and understanding the implications (hundreds if not thousands of MonoBehavior.Update per frame). I'm coding for the Quest 2 so it's "code first" for performance over most things.

 

I want to write about the best practices themselves.
With some mixed best practices from more than one category, for example best practice for building a 3D-world efficient with prefabs and so on...
I get that point, you're right it's quite generic.
It's for university, but it's only a about 25-30-pager.

 

Thank you very much, that are a lot of sources, I can start with.

 

Best place to look for best practices is post mortems. Dev blogs and unite videos are good places to look.

Whenever they are talking about things that went well or were easy to manage, that's a good practice. Whenever they talk about things being hard, that's probably something to be avoided.