Hi guys, Thunder here.
Today I was looking for some way to get involved in game making, and I remembered hearing about this thing called Unity Web Player. Naturally, not knowing something that intrigued me, I immediately conducted a google search to find out more about it. It appears to me that you can not only play games with the free Unity Web Player download, but also make games “fairly” easily with their easy to understand game creation screen.
I know that Stonehearth has nothing to do with unity web player, but I was wondering if anybody who knows what they are talking about thinks that fooling around with Unity is a good way to get some experience in coding.
unity3d is a very impressive development platform, that has grown in popularity considerably over the past several years… as with virtually any platform though, depending on what you want to accomplish, the barrier to entry can be pretty daunting…
i’ve hardly had any time with it myself, but from what i’ve seen/read/heard, if you are interested in game development, this is indeed a worthwhile tool to leverage…
spend some time with those tutorials, and see if its something you want to dig deeper into… odds are, you will be happy with the decision…
Ok I had to find a computer to redo this entire post. I couldn’t stand a badly formatted post.
Unity is great. The webplayer is just a small plug-in portion of Unity that lets you quickly display your game, or even just specific parts. Unity made it mainly to show case items that you can find in the asset store. The asset store isn’t really a place to learn - more so to buy code that will save you a boat load of time. Free things can be found there, and often Unity doesn’t approve poorly written code but I’ve found my fair share of badly written stuff on there.
Things I suggest if you are going to use Unity3D
Don’t use javascript (script language in Unity). The javascript in Unity is NOT the javascript everyone else is thinking about. Unitys javascript was tailored for Unity to make it easy for people to program. Its VERY shorthand, and you can get away with a lot of syntax stuff you wouldn’t be able to get away with in a real language (when I say syntax other languages will NOT fill or try to convert things, while Unity javascript will. This will lead to just bad coding habits in general in my opinion.) I’d use C# in unity instead. No one uses Boo
Don’t copy and paste code. If you copy and paste code you’ll just get into the habit of not learning, searching the internet for code snips, just to get a quick desired result. In the end, nothing will work how you want it only close to it, unless you learn to code. Instead of copying and pasting, learn from it. Retype it and see if you can understand whats going on step by step of what you are typing. Start out with something simple, and best to avoid physics related coding early on. If you run into a second you don’t know, learn about it! Google “Unity Ref” and don’t forget to change the example display from “Java” to “C#”.g
Learn to drink from a garden hose, and realize it will be this way for awhile. As long as you get a little water (learned something, no matter how small) then you did good.
Don’t cram. Trying to learn everything in one day is just going to be worthless. Learn something, apply it, and then if you have to keep reapplying it, it will become second nature.
Use the unity answers forum to your benefit. Don’t simply ASK for code there, search the answers first for someone with your problem, and go from there.
You’re going to have two garden hoses to drink from, I forgot to mention. Not only are you going to be learning how to use a rather extensive program (Unity) but you are also looking to learn how to Code…
The Unity reference manual will be your go to tool for awhile. Even people that have used Unity extensively for a large amount of time still forget parameters and arguments.
You will get frustrated, you will want to pull your hair. You’ll fight with a problem for hours, and then all of the sudden it will click - the solution, and you’ll get it. It’ll be rewarding.
I hate to disagree, but I disagree. If you are using code that can be helpful in the long run, people tend to try and memorize it or at least learn how it works, which, I think is better than trying to make something out of nothing, especially for all these people that don’t know how to code.
Each learn in their own mamners best. Ifyoull notice I said its fine if you rewrite the code you are interested. If you are copying large code that you don’t understand you are just trying to run before you’ve walked in my opinion.
i would agree with @FinKone, but only in regards to learning what the code is doing… i would advise against copying and pasting code, that you have no knowledge of what it’s accomplishing…
if you have a decent understanding of the language, you are looking for a code snippet to accomplish a specific task, and someone has already written something efficient (and you grasp what was written), then by all means… copy and paste!
if, however, you are just starting out, learning the way code is written (syntax) is an extremely important part of the learning process (and is lost if the new user only copy/pastes the tutorial code they read)…
This is a very individual topic, but in my experience the best practice is:
Do only Copy and Paste for very “Quick and Dirty” results, where quality is not of the matter - OR do as @FinKone said and do learn from the copied code, effectively making the knowledge your own, which will only make you better.
Its fine to use established frameworks or APIs without going into their details.
For example this forum runs on Discourse which is written in Ruby on Rails, without the Rails framework Ruby would probably be as infamous for bad code as PHP is now.
I don’t know if there are such frameworks available for Unity, but if so it might be a good idea to use one for a while.
Contradictory to the opinion that “learning from scratch” is a good thing, this leads to a massive amount of coders with bad practices that are hard to break.
Working within a framework or with established solutions will give you the opportunity to learn within and with best practice approaches, hopefully saving you from a lot of bad habits!
