Understanding parentheses – why are they there?
by Chris Dickinson, John P. Doran, Greg Lukosek
Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Table of Contents
- Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Credits
- Preface
- 1. Module 1
- 1. Discovering Your Hidden Scripting Skills and Getting Your Environment Ready
- Prerequisite knowledge to use this book
- Dealing with scriptphobia
- Downloading Unity
- Teaching behavior to GameObjects
- C# documentation – where to find it? Do I need it at all?
- Working with C# script files
- Creating a C# script file
- Introducing the MonoDevelop code editor
- Instance? What is it?
- Summary
- 2. Introducing the Building Blocks for Unity Scripts
- 3. Getting into the Details of Variables
- Writing C# statements properly
- Understanding component properties in Unity's Inspector
- Changing a property's value in the Inspector panel
- Private variables
- Naming your variables properly
- Beginning variable names with lowercase
- Using multiword variable names
- Declaring a variable and its type
- Assigning values while declaring a variable
- Where you declare a variable is important
- Variable scope – determining where a variable can be used
- Summary
- 4. Getting into the Details of Methods
- 5. Lists, Arrays, and Dictionaries
- 6. Loops
- 7. Object, a Container with Variables and Methods
- 8. Let's Make a Game! – From Idea to Development
- 9. Starting Your First Game
- 10. Writing GameManager
- 11. The Game Level
- 12. The User Interface
- 13. Collectables — What Next?
- 1. Discovering Your Hidden Scripting Skills and Getting Your Environment Ready
- 2. Module 2
- 01. 2D Twin-stick Shooter
- Project overview
- Setting up the project
- Creating our scene
- Implementing player movement
- Shooting behavior
- Creating enemies
- Adding GameController to spawn enemy waves
- Particle systems for enemy explosion
- Adding in sound effects/music
- Adding in points, score, and wave numbers
- Publishing the game
- Summary
- Challenges
- 2. Creating GUIs
- 3. GUIs Part 2 – Clicker Game
- 4. Mobile Endless Game – Procedural Content
- Project overview
- Prerequisites
- Project setup
- Adding the background
- Adding a simple animated character
- Making a repeating background
- Working with sorting layers
- Creating our player behaviour
- Creating obstacles
- Spawning obstacles at runtime
- Game start and end behaviours
- Keeping score
- Summary
- Challenges
- 5. Shooting Gallery – Working with Animations and Tweens
- 6. Side-scrolling Platformer
- 7. First Person Shooter Part 1 – Creating Exterior Environments
- 8. First-person Shooter Part 2 – Creating Interior Environments
- 9. First Person Shooter Part 3 – Implementing Gameplay and AI
- 10. Building an In-Game Level Editor
- 11. Finishing Touches
- 01. 2D Twin-stick Shooter
- 3. Module 3
- 1. Detecting Performance Issues
- 2. Scripting Strategies
- Cache Component references
- Obtaining Components using the fastest method
- Removing empty callback declarations
- Avoiding the Find() and SendMessage() methods at runtime
- Disabling unused scripts and objects
- Consider using distance-squared over distance
- Avoid retrieving string properties from GameObjects
- Update, Coroutines, and InvokeRepeating
- Consider caching Transform changes
- Faster GameObject null reference checks
- Summary
- 3. The Benefits of Batching
- 4. Kickstart Your Art
- Audio
- Loading audio files
- Encoding formats and quality levels
- Audio performance enhancements
- Minimize active Audio Source count
- Minimize Audio Clip references
- Enable Force to Mono for 3D sounds
- Resample to lower frequencies
- Consider all encoding formats
- Beware of streaming
- Apply Filter effects through Mixer groups to reduce duplication
- Use "WWW.audioClip" responsibly
- Consider Audio Module files for background music
- Texture files
- Mesh and animation files
- Summary
- Audio
- 5. Faster Physics
- Physics Engine internals
- Physics performance optimizations
- Scene setup
- Use Static Colliders appropriately
- Optimize the Collision Matrix
- Prefer discrete collision detection
- Modify the FixedUpdate frequency
- Adjust the Maximum Allowed Timestep
- Minimize cast and bounding-volume checks
- Avoid complex Mesh Colliders
- Avoid complex physics components
- Let physics objects sleep
- Modify Solver Iteration Count
- Optimizing ragdolls
- Know when to use physics
- Consider upgrading to Unity 5
- Summary
- 6. Dynamic Graphics
- Profiling rendering issues
- Front end bottlenecks
- Back end bottlenecks
- Fill rate
- Overdraw
- Occlusion Culling
- Shader optimization
- Consider using Shaders intended for mobile platforms
- Use small data types
- Avoid changing precision while swizzling
- Use GPU-optimized helper functions
- Disable unnecessary features
- Remove unnecessary input data
- Only expose necessary variables
- Reduce mathematical complexity
- Reduce texture lookups
- Avoid conditional statements
- Reduce data dependencies
- Surface Shaders
- Use Shader-based LOD
- Memory bandwidth
- VRAM limits
- Fill rate
- Lighting and Shadowing
- Optimizing graphics for mobile
- Summary
- 7. Masterful Memory Management
- 8. Tactical Tips and Tricks
- A. Bibliography
- Index
One thing for sure is that parentheses make it easy to recognize that it's a method, but why are they part of a method's name?
We already know that a method is a code block that is going to be called multiple times. That's one of the reasons a method is created in the first place—so that we don't have to write the same code over and over. Remember the AddAndPrintTwoNumbers() example method? We have mentioned that a method can take some input parameters. Why is this useful?
A script may need to add two numbers several times, but they probably won't always be the same two numbers. We can have possibly hundreds of different combinations of two numbers to add together. This means that we need to let the method know which two numbers need to be added together at the moment when we call the method. Let's write a code example to make sure you fully understand it:
Lines 7, 8, and 9 should be quite clear to you—simple declarations of variables.
Let's take a look at the AddAndPrintTwoNumbers method. It's a void function. Again, this means the function does something but does not return any data. Inside the parentheses, our method takes two variables: firstNumber and secondNumber.
Line 25 contains the declaration and assignment of the local variable that we will be printing on line 26.
So, AddAndPrintTwoNumbers is written the universal way. We can reuse this function as many times as we want, passing different parameters.
Lines 15, 16, and 17 call our function three times, each time passing different parameters to the function. Let's test whether it works! Go ahead, add the LearningReusableMethods component to any GameObject in the Unity scene, and click on Play.
As this script executes, the AddAndPrintTwoNumbers method is called three times on lines 15, 16, and 17. The method's code block adds two numbers and displays the result in the Unity Console tab:
As expected! The console will print out the values. There's a special name for information between the parentheses of a method definition, such as line 23—the code is called method parameters.
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