First! Unity.
“A compiler, did you say?”
I called Unity a compiler once and I got that question. Well, isn’t that what Unity is? Basically if you take a computer language for instance, many come with compilers that turn the language scripts into machine code. The script itself is a higher programming language like C, C#, C++ and the likes of Java. If you think about it that’s what Unity does to. It takes your scene and C# scripting input and turns it all into a machine code something the cpu understands.
So let’s look at the interface or GUI real quickly.
This is a blank GUI of the Unity Interface. In a moment we are going to travel around the Unity interface briefly and note the structure of the GUI. Now please understand this article is only a very brief introduction.
It’s no different, the GUI I mean, than an app designed to build business software complete with a WYSIWYG interface.
Let’s start the tour.
For reference please use the first blank Unity page picture at the start of this article as a navigation reference.
To embellish the tour I brought in an apartment scene which is a work in progress.
The scene window is where the construction of the game or whatever the project is that is under construction is performed. Note the few objects present. Now let’s see where those objects are listed. Looking to the left of the scene window is the hierarchy.
By default the hierarchy sits off to the left of the scene window. By default I mean to suggest the windows of the Unity GUI are undockable so they can be moved about the Unity GUI at leisure.
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Most importantly the hierarchy lists the objects in the whole project regardless of where the scene window may be pointing. Next is a picture of the apartment scene’s hierarchy.
Now let’s note the relationship between the hierarchy and the scene window.
Also, note but not shown and directly off to the left of the hierarchy are icons which allow the hiding of objects so the focus can be placed more directly on on something that otherwise would be obstructed from view. It’s a very handy means to unclutter the view.
Now let’s look down from the hierarchy and the scene window where there are two tabbed folders. These are the Project and Console Folders.
Looking at the picture above are what I call the tabbed folders. The project folder is chosen for this example. The project folder lists all the important folders for a project. Note how the blue arrow demonstrates that the sub folder, in this case the Prefabs folder, shows a relationship just like the Scene Window and the Hierarchy did above. As you can see the contents of the Prefab folder is displayed in the next panel over. It is important to note that the objects in the Prefab folder are called “instanced” objects.
An instanced object means it can be placed in the scene window over and over and if that object is edited, that edit is shared with all the instances or duplicates of that same object. So an Instance object is simply a fancy expression for a duplicated object. Even if the object which was duplicated has a change made to it at a later point the duplicates will inherit the same change. Even if there are multiple changes to that object the instanced objects will get the same change too.
Note the other sub folders listed within the Project tab. The ones that will be most pertinent to my future articles will be the Materials, Prefabs and the Scripts sub folders. All these folders are usually kept within the assets category of the projects tab.
Over to the right of the scene window is a very important part of Unity, the inspector.
A lot of the action in Unity happens in the inspector. It lists the components of each object. Note how the tv is listed as the object and the tv is highlighted in the scene window.
Each object has a Transform usually accompanied with a Mesh Renderer component. Below those are the materials for the tv.
Where we will be focusing in the upcoming weeks will be in the inspector and the scripts sub folder where our C# programming will be stored. Stay tuned as this journey continues.
