Guided Tutorial: Introduction to Unity

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Mark Vrablic provides an overview of the Unity game engine and how to work with the software interface. This is provided to help students get started on an even footing when jumping into the guided tutorial.

GUEST SPEAKER 1: OK, so we are going to be going through the role of all tutorial today. This is one of the Unity provided tutorials. And it is extremely good. Like, I was going to try to create something. And I did. And it wasn't anywhere near as clear. So it is here on this web page, which if you could write down how, that would be great.

GUEST SPEAKER 2: Yep. Unity.com?

GUEST SPEAKER 1: Yep.

[INAUDIBLE]

Learn/tutorials/projects.

GUEST SPEAKER 2: /roll?

GUEST SPEAKER 1: /rollaballtutorial or you can just Google, roll a ball. It will be the first result.

OK, so this is the Unity game editor. Don't really worry about what it looks like-- sorry, like right now. It will introduce that to you when you guys go off and do small groups to start going through it. But here is the end goal. This is what the camera sees, by the way.

And so you can move your ball around with the arrow keys and collect a bunch of pick up items. I need to lower the--

[LAUGHTER]

GUEST SPEAKER 2: Whoa!

[LAUGHTER]

GUEST SPEAKER 1: I need to lower the acceleration values in that.

[LAUGHTER]

GUEST SPEAKER 1: I played around with a bit and yeah. One quick side note before you start going through. The Unity editor has a bunch of different layouts. So sometimes when you see these tutorials, it's going to be a different looking editor. Let's see this one. I think. Yeah.

So everybody has their own layout of the Unity editor that they like best. The default one is not like this. And it's not like mine. And how you can change that is through window and layouts. I'd suggest experimenting with all of them, find which one you like most. They all offer the same functionality. The panels correspond to each other. So when you see the hierarchy panel within the tutorial, it's the same as this panel, even though it's not the same shape, you know. Yeah. Is there anything else I should go through?

GUEST SPEAKER 2: Is the tutorial a video or is this--

GUEST SPEAKER 1: Yeah.

GUEST SPEAKER 2: The rest inside Unity?

GUEST SPEAKER 1: Yeah, so they have a bunch of videos. And these videos have the corresponding code down below, if you need to examine it more closely. They used to have the corresponding code in Java and Python, also. But now they don't.

Unity is largely c-sharp based. But you don't need to know c-sharp, really, going into it. It's very simple. They do a fairly good job of explaining it.

GUEST SPEAKER 2: Do you want to mention the reference, even if you don't [INAUDIBLE]

GUEST SPEAKER 1: Yeah, So they do talk about the reference, but--

GUEST SPEAKER 2: So you don't have the program pretty much anything in Unity, else you want to do something custom, and then you add a little script. And the script has a bunch of functions that are pre-built into Unity. And there is a website that has all of those functions on it, and f you need to do something, you go look here.

GUEST SPEAKER 1: And this is kind of intimidating right now. But everything is gathered in classes. And they'll explain these to you. And each component you want to access is going to be within a subclass. And so Unityengine.windows. And then you can access your windows functions. It's like speech recognition or for getting files, etc. Or similar stuff.

GUEST SPEAKER 2: If you see some crazy function and you're like, what? Then it's probably here. And you can go read about it here. And--

GUEST SPEAKER 1: There is a handy search bar up here.

GUEST SPEAKER 2: So when you come across something, you come up here, search for it, and then you can read it in a little more detail about how it works and what it does.

GUEST SPEAKER 1: Yeah. And like, similarly if you see a command like, rigid body, add force, you can see, OK, well, this is what it's expecting, a vector and then a force mode. And that's it. And if you don't have those arguments, It's not going to be happy.

GUEST SPEAKER 1: Cool.