A Software Engineer’s Guide to Unity and AR/VR Development – Part 1

I've recently started exploring the world of Unity and the weirdest thing about it is that it's 90%/10% in favour of video tutorials - even for the purely code-based aspects.

Even Unity's own official tutorials are all in video form.

I have noticed that with UE4 and houdini as well. I assume to some extent it makes sense if you are actually navigating a GUI as complex as that. Still drives me crazy though.

A couple extra points to complement the article:

- Boo support is all but dropped, so avoid going with that.

- The JavaScript variant is not exactly what is in a browser.

- For C# MonoBehaviours, the class name must match the file name (without extension) in order for Unity Editor to see it. Namespaces are both supported and not displayed when adding a component.

- The Editor identifies file relationships by the GUID assigned in "meta files" if "Visable Meta Files" is chosen in the "Version Control" entry in the project settings. All files imported will then have another created with a suffix of ".meta".

- Selecting an "Asset Serialization" mode of "Force Text" will cause Unity to use YAML for things such as scenes, prefabs, meta files, etc. This can make using Git much nicer as well as enable use of text processing tools (such as grep or ack).

- When importing assets from the Asset Store, always review what files the package wants to import! Many will ship resources such as Standard Assets which can be outdated and/or cause conflicts.

- The built-in package management will only update or add files from a package. This many times leaves stale files lying around which can cause problems.

EDIT: If using text (YAML) serialization and Git, trying to merge conflicts in scenes (.unity) or prefabs (.prefab) will almost certainly end badly. Better to coordinate changes between people through communication, doing a "use mine or use theirs" conflict resolution strategy when people step on each other's work.

EDIT-2: Here are three utility assets which I have found to be invaluable (all are free):

- Vexe Framework: https://github.com/vexe/VFW

- LINQ to GameObject: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/24256

- Unity Test Tools: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13802

I am coding a VR game in Unity as a side project.

Day job is Java HFT FinTech, so I wanted a short bridging course.

There are many blogs about it, but if you really want to learn fast yet thoroughly I would recommend an online video course.

I recently did Ben Tristem's Unity Course - https://www.udemy.com/unitycourse/ which is excellent and shows you all the tips and tricks of the trade. Wishlist the course and often there are massive discounts

Some non-obvious things:

- Animation - Prefabs - AudioSources - Colliders - Scenes and Scene Management - localPosition - Quaternion.EurlerAngles - Raycast - finding named objects in the scene - relation between GameObjects and Transforms

This is where I've found Lynda's tutorials great. They align the text to the video so you can see and read at the same time. I was able to get pretty far by reading Unity In Action though, which was purely just a book tutorial and I really enjoyed it. So I don't know, I would attribute it more to a younger audience who is more receptive of videos over written tutorials.