10. Building an In-Game Level Editor
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
Once you have your game mechanics finished up, you will need to fill up your game with content. You could use the Unity Editor to place things by hand, but as you may have seen earlier, it takes a really long time. It's also possible for us to create an array as we did earlier in Chapter 6, Side-scrolling Platformer, but in that case, your levels need to be defined in a script and you'll need to either use an external tool or type in numbers individually for it to work correctly.
Another option is to save and load level files inside the game, and that way you can playtest your levels and make changes on the fly and save them when you're ready. We also have the advantage of being able to see exactly what the level looks like when you're making it.
In this chapter, we are going to add in functionality to our previously created side-scrolling platformer game, adding in an in-game level editor, which can be used for future projects.
In addition, we will also gain exposure to the Immediate Mode GUI system (IMGUI), which is a code-driven GUI system that was the only way to create GUIs before Unity 4.6, and is currently a tool primarily used by programmers for tools development and custom inspectors for scripts or new editors to extend Unity itself.
One of the nice things of working with this system is that you do not need to have any art assets to create and can make your menus entirely through code, so it's still worthwhile to touch and then decide which you'd like to use for your own future projects.
This project will be split into a number of tasks. It will be a simple step-by-step process from beginning to end. Here is the outline of our tasks:
- Level editor – introduction
- Adding/removing walls at runtime
- Toggling editor, GUI, and selecting additional tiles
- Saving/loading levels to file
In this chapter, we will use projects that we created in the earlier chapters, specifically the project from Chapter 6, Side-scrolling Platformer. You may continue with your previous projects or pick up a copy along with the assets for this chapter from the example code provided for this book on Packt Publishing's website (https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support).
In addition, the completed project and source files are located there for you to check whether you have any questions or need clarification.
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