Ok, I’m new to unity, and have a few questions. I’ve been going through tutorials and am really enjoying it.
Why is this FPS tutorial not linked to from the unity tutorials page? I found it googling, but now I’m wondering what other tutorials are “hidden” (a quick site-wide google didn’t give me anything else immediately). Is it out of date, or what? If it is, will I have any trouble following it?
Controls: can they be customized? I can’t seem to find any customization options, except the rather tiny selection in Edit>Preferences>Keys. Am I missing something? I never use mouselook (though I guess it would be more useful in game development looking from a player’s POV), and was surprised that unity doesn’t use the standard MMB=orbit controls. I’d much rather have RMB be orbit instead of mouselook, or, even better, have MMB be orbit and RMB be pan. I was thinking of writing a script to remap some of that if I can’t change it within unity.
Coming from Blender, I’d much rather use the keyboard for things. Is there a list of shortcuts to use? For instance, can I change views via keyboard without using that manipulator thing? Can I switch to iso mode without first switching to one of the side views? Can I move/rotate/scale without using the handles? Can I lock movement(/scale/rotation) to a plane? Also, when you move/rotate by grabbing the center of the handles, is it locked to the viewplane? What are the shortcuts for play/pause/step?
I realize that Unity is closed source, but is their any openness? I’m sure there’s probably a plugin framework, but do I have any options fooling around with the workings of the editor? Can I modify the unity GUI at all (besides dragging panels around)? Could I theoretically change the scene editor to act more like Blender? Can I write scripts to do things in Unity for me?
Random question: if I have lots of things selected, can I change their properties in the Inspector all at once? For instance, if I have a pile of rigidbodies, selecting them all and then changing “drag” variable only changes the last one selected.
Is there a reference for the menus? The reference manual has a lot of stuff, but I was looking specifically for how the “move to view” function worked, which I still don’t really understand, and it’s not in the reference manual.
Where are new objects spawned? I get that it’s along the view’s sightline, but is it a set distance from the viewer? It seems to act oddly. Can I change it to, say, always spawn new objects at 0,0,0?
Don’t think I’ve seen that one before either, there’s probably a few, it’s possible that’s an old one that doesn’t work with v3.x?
Yes, you can change the controls and such. I think you can for the Editor too
Probably in the Documentation?
Plugins can be written for Unity Pro (not Unity Free), there’s some info on how to do that in the Documentation
Depends, sometimes yes, if they’re children of an object that’s selected, and sometimes no, it doesn’t seem to work right. But you can write Editor scripts to do that.
Yes, the Documentation (top of this page, those links take you to all the different docs.
Depends, up to you, you can script it to spawn things anywhere you like, or use vertex snapping etc.
Bump. Thanks frank, but you didn’t really answer most of my questions. @Fourthings: thanks for that second link, it looks really good. The first one I knew about and the third and fourth, well, I’m not going to be paying $60 for tutorials until I’m getting a profit from my games, at which point I probably won’t need it :). But it still has little to do with the OP.
I’d like some more specific answers to my questions. I’ve already looked at the documentation and reference for what I could, and I wouldn’t be asking if I found it there :).
Unity isn’t as keyboard-oriented as Blender, AFAICT. You can write editor scripts and tie them to keyboard shortcuts, so the workflow can certainly be customized to a certain extent. However, not all editor settings are exposed via scripting (for example, I don’t think the current scene-view camera projection mode is exposed via scripting).
Just repeating the above, more or less, but you can extend Unity’s editor to a great degree by using editor scripting. However, there are some limits (mostly due to the fact that not every aspect of the editor’s functionality is exposed via scripting).
Again, editor scripting is probably your best bet here.
I don’t know how depth is determined when spawning objects. To always spawn at the origin though, you could easily write an editor script that creates a new game object and places it at the origin, and then tie the script to a keyboard shortcut.
Can I write scripts to do things in Unity for me?