Unity IDE crash course
To better understand this book, we'll need to cover the basic features of the Unity IDE.
If you open Unity for the first time, you'll be presented with a window where you can either open an existing project or create a new one. Select the Create New Project tab, and choose a location for your project.
Once your project is created, you'll see a number of panels. There are the Scene and Game tabs, the Hierarchy, Project, and Console tabs, and the Inspector tab.
The Scene view shows the current scene. This will allow you to navigate the scene, select objects, move them around, and more. The Game view shows the view of the main camera. If you press the Play button, the Game view is automatically shown and allows you to play test your game from inside the editor.
The Hierarchy tab shows the object hierarchy of the current scene. This allows you to select objects, parent or unparent them, delete them, rename them, and much more.
The Inspector tab shows the editors for each component attached to the selected object (rather than being inheritance based like many traditional engines, Unity is component based, where objects are a collection of components and each component has a separate responsibility). It allows you to set values and change properties of components. You can also remove components by right clicking on a component and clicking on Remove Component. In Unity 4 and later, you can also click on the Add Component button and select a component script.
The Project tab shows the assets in your project. You can drop game assets here to import them, and you can create new materials, scripts, and shaders by right-clicking and selecting the Create option. You can also drag objects from the Hierarchy to the Project tab to create a prefab. Prefabs are essentially object templates—you can Instantiate a prefab to create an exact copy of the prefab in the scene (for instance, you might create an Enemy prefab, and instantiate it to spawn enemies). You can also drag component scripts from the Project to the Inspector of a selected game object to add the component to the object.
To learn more about Unity, you can get started here:
