How do I use Unity's example projects?

Questions & Answers
1

I have downloaded an example project from the support section on the Unity website.

  1. How do I open it in Unity?
  2. What are the different folders for?
  3. Where should I unzip it?
  4. Can I use the assets for my own projects?
3

  1. Open projects from the file menu -> open project -> open other -> browse to the project folder -> click open folder. Alternatively, you can hold the ALT key while starting Unity to get the New Project Wizard. From there, click the Open Project-tab and follow the same procedure as above.

  2. The Assets folder is where you store all your content. Within that you can place a number of different folders that Unity use mainly for the order of compiling scripts. There are additional "special" folders Assets/Gizmos, for placing gizmo icons and Assets/Resources for retrieving assets at runtime.

  3. A Unity project can be placed almost anywhere on your computer, so that is up to you. If using external hard drives, you have to aware of case sensitivity, because there have been some problems with that on different platforms.

  4. The assets provided by Unity Technologies can be used freely, unless other has been specified. Apart from the assets in the example projects, various assets can be downloaded from the support section on Unity's website to get developers started. However, if you plan to sell games it is always a good idea to produce your own assets.

2

  1. Start Unity, menu File/Open Project ..., click on the button "Open Other..." and browse to the top folder of the project which contains Assets and Library as subfolders

  2. Assets contains your Assets (models, textures, scripts, sound-files and so on), Library is used by Unity ... you may look at it, but don't touch ;-)

  3. Wherever you feel is appropriate ... I have my own folder with all example projects.

  4. Yes, unless specified otherwise (and in general, people won't like it very much if you just take one of the projects and put it on the AppStore as it is ... which did happen in the past)