A New Unity Member Has Joined.

News & General Discussion
1

Hey all!

I am not sure if this is the appropriate category to post an introduction, so I apologize in advance if this isn’t the place.

I just wanted to introduce myself and say hello.

I am brand new to this program and as long as I stick with it, I am sure you will be getting a lot of questions from me. I am incredibly impressed with the documentation and resources here! Very well written and easy to read. The only problem is I barely know where to begin! haha

Anyways,

I have no programming experience under my belt other than web programming (some PHP and action script etc.) so I am hoping whether I ease into this or jump head first; that I will start grasping the concepts laid out to me.

I currently run a review site exclusive to PC Gamers and I am been working on a new project and Unity seems to be one of the tools that will provide a majority of the “sizzle” that the project will be offering the community involved.

So with that said, hello to all and if you have any suggestions or advice for the newbie, feel free to drop a line here.

Thanks for reading :wink:

2

advice - search for your questions before asking them :slight_smile:

welcome to the forums!

3

Well said, I can’t tell you how often I give that same advice.

The rule of thumb is that as soon as you ask the question, you find the answer seconds later haha

4

welcome to the forums!!

i hope you enjoy your stay

another advice, read the documentation hehehe i know basic, but you would be surprised the number of people who misses that

5

Welcome.

My suggestion would be to start small - rather than take on extremely large projects.

There are a few tutorials around the boards, which are well worth tucking into… such as the M2H tut’s, in my opinion they are very valuable for newcomers.

Tony

6

Welcome, Ctrl-Alt-RAGE!

You’ll notice from Tony’s signature that there are some books about Unity available and also a magazine. If you check out the Teaching section of the forum, you’ll find some additional tutorials and there are quite a few videos about Unity on YouTube. Plenty to get your teeth into!

7

Ctrl-Alt-Rage, what is your specialty? Do you do art, scripting or both?

8

Not to worry Tony, I was just gonna make the next WoW. So a super small project for sure! haha :stuck_out_tongue:

I appreciate that advice, after seeing Unity it’s incredibly easy to get excited to want to bring your creative thoughts to life; but I do know the reality of it and I know I’ll have to start small. When I start getting familiar with it, I will post some of the ideas I am looking to start with before getting into actual story-driven games.

As far as specialty goes, I’d like to think I am a jack of all trades but a master of none. If I could pin my talents on one thing, it would be design and creative theory.

My background is in software and I work a lot with 3D modeling (but for the jewelry industry hah)

Me weakest link is going to be scripting, not because I don’t understand it, but because I haven’t ever had to get into it.

I have access to several books that our programming department uses so hopefully those will help, I haven’t even opened up the trial yet as I want to read through the documentation before opening up the program and potentially getting discouraged.

9

Welcome to the community

I really wouldn’t advise the use of books for the sake of learning programming. They are a waste of your time, and a waste of your money. The majority of authors that I’ve found that write these books don’t actually understand Object Oriented programming, and generally are teaching habits for programming that were popularized in the last two decades, but are now completely inadequate ways of doing things.

If you are determined though, I’d suggest looking into something game-specific, and not targeted to teenagers.

Another suggestion is StackOverflow and GameDev.net once you start understanding code well enough to translate between two languages. I bounce between three programming forums. Unity’s probably got the least knowledgeable community (there are noteworthy exceptions here, such as Andeeeeee and Eric) of any programming forum I attend, however, the lack of knowledge is more than made up for by the incredibly friendly and approachable nature of almost all the members here. There aren’t a lot of arguments on this board, strangely, and there’s a lack of the of the usual ego-driven flamewars that seem to be associated with programming forums.

It’s a nice place, helpful people (maybe not a lot of experts running around), but still a very good community.

Also, one of the best ways to learn programming is to kick the crutch out from under yourself almost immediately. Keep the training wheels on only long enough to understand basic programming logic and syntax, and then dive into the API documents, and start trying to build things. Avoid using the forums, avoid asking for help. Drown in your errors and problems until you’ve tried everything, and then start googling/searching the forums, and if you still can’t find the solution, ask the question.

I was without internet for the majority of the time I was learning C++ back in the day, and as such, had no avenue for help, just a copy of the MSDN library. After about three months, I’d learned more about programing just from myself than I would ever learn in the rest of my life. In the end, I found that classes, books, and tutorials are only good for learning logic and methodologies, and APIs are what you need to be looking at most of the time.

10

Terrey,

I appreciate that feedback. That takes a load off of my chest because I’ve never been one to learn from books; more from just doing. But this is such a different avenue that as I stated in my initial post, I didn’t know where to begin. Your post was very helpful.

The programming department where I work are all laid back dudes, who typically have nightly LAN parties with me. So they are all about the easiest, effective and most efficient way possible to get something done. They do a lot of their programming in C#. I am unaware of the differences of C++ VS. C# other than C# completing a lot of the code that you would otherwise have to do in C++. Something along those lines (I am massacring the explanation so I apologize haha).

I will check out the site you listed to see what it’s all about. As a “newbie” in programming jumping into things is incredibly daunting. Especially with all of the engines and theories that have come out now. Either way, I am eager to learn and grow into this.

I’ve also been looking at XNA Developers but I found Unity and it seemed to cater more to what I am initially trying to do.

11

I don’t want you to get the idea that programming’s all about shoot from the hip. You learn a lot by doing, but you also have to do a lot of research too. Getting better at programming only requires enough intellect to process information, and google. You are going to have to read a lot, but once you figure out how things are done, you can start improvising your own systems and methodologies for completing tasks.

I just think that programming books are written by people who don’t really know what they are doing, for the most part. I don’t like being asked to pay $80 for a thousand pages of “Employee/Employer class structures”, and other basic ideas that aren’t immediately useful to a game developer.

There are just plain better resources out there on the web. (Want an example of the lack of resources for game developers written by competent people? Search for Forward Kinematics tutorials, and Mesh Skinning tutorials in relation to skeletal animation. There are about a square dozen of them out there, and they are all garbage. I’ve also never seen a book that covered it in any kind of decent way. This is why many programmers couldn’t write their own 3D engine if they tried, these days. I did it, but it took a month of work to get the matrices working properly, and OpenGL to animate things acceptably.)

12

Gotcha,

So just a vague but hopefully easily answered question I could ask you. (which I am sure could be found by google, but at the same time, you seem to know of an effective direction to head in)

What should be my first steps in getting proficient?

I am not looking at a guideline from beginning to end, nor am I looking for someone to hold my hand through it all.

Other than reading the documentation on how to use this particular platform. What would you do in my shoes with little to no experience in the field to take the appropriate steps to get comfortable into the basics?

I know some of you who may read this may think “Why don’t you just do a search on the interwebs?” haha But we all know when it comes to questions that will receive “opinionated” answers, it’s sometimes best to ask someone on the same wavelength as yourself. Terrey, you seem to be a little similar to my thought process. That’s how I’ve learned anything I’ve done on a computer.

PHP coding and actionscript, I just looked up templates of already completed projects and started modifying them and experimenting with them and in time I started partially understanding how it worked.

So with that said, do you have any suggestions for me on where to start? (outside of the documentation on Unity, I am talking about getting a basic understanding in general).

I don’t want you to have to write out a long winded reply, the last thing I want from you is to waste your time on a curious dude. But any help is appreciated.

Thanks again in advance.

13

Time, is something I have an abundance of… Some people would say wind is another resource I’m quite blessed with as well.

My advice would be to load up a pre-made unity example, such as the island demo, and try to understand what’s going on. Take a look at the code, and try to reverse-engineer a little bit. I bet my bottom dollar you are like me, and when you look at a structure, you extrapolate it into a floorplan instead of just a building. I bet you look at things and wonder to yourself how you would have built it.

If that’s the case, reverse engineering is a good point to start at. Try thinking up a simple feature, like a crouch button, and attempt to implement it. When you feel comfortable modifying something, load up a new project folder, and build something small. Something really simple like an arcade game would probably be a good baseline. Then, you can start to build up your knowledge, moving on to larger and larger projects, and feel free to experiment with multiple techniques.

There is also a set of tutorials that will show you a few things here and there, for instance, the FPS demo, and the Lerpz demo are both pretty decent, and come with tutorials on how to do things. A lot of people start out like this. Don’t get discouraged, though. Every failure is a learning experience.

Learning programming logic is really simple. I would strongly suggest you learn C#, and avoid using UnityScript (Javascript). It will serve you better as a programmer, and C# is much more difficult than UnityScript, so you will actually basically be learning both at the same time, since they are similar enough that a good C# programmer can pick up UnityScript in about 15 minutes. (I learn new syntaxes in about an hour these days, and learn new APIs in a few weeks, after having learned multiple, multiple languages and APIs.)

In order to really get programming, you are going to need to understand a few concepts:

Order of Operations
Binary data manipulation
Comparison, Assignment, Arithmatic and Logical Operators
Keywords
Variables
Conditional Operations
Loops
Functions
Classes
Object Oriented heirarchy
Typecasting
Pointers and data values

For the most part, these are all really simple concepts. They take some time to master, but it can be summed up in about three hours worth of learning. Putting it in practice, though, takes a bit longer. The Unity basics tutorials will mostly use UnityScript, but it’s very simple to convert from Unityscript to C#, and if you run into any problems doing so, I’m usually lurking, and there are others that can help you with that.