How to find what you're looking for in the Documentation?

Questions & Answers
1

My Problem is, if I search the API for "yield", it gives only some rough idea about what exactly it does. Searching for "function" returns Zero entries. If I search the frontpages of the Manual, the Reference and the Scripting-documentation with my browser's "find next" for the term "function" I still don't get any hit for a "further reading". By now I know that I have to look out for "MonoBehaviour" if I want to find out about "function XY", though I'm not quite sure if that gives me all the possible keywords I can put after the "function"-keyword in a script??

I suppose the general idea about what things do is not the API's job... That's what the Scripting-Overview and the Manual are there for... but those are excluded form the search-option so it's a pain to find what you want.... :( How do I find out there's a page about my topic in the ScriptingOverview, in the Manual or in the Reference? Especially if I'm not sure which of the synonymous terms (function / behaviour / whatnot) I need to look out for...? :-/

So, can you give me some hints on how to get the most out of the documentation, please? So I have to pester you less in the future ;)

Greetz, Ky.

(In my defense for asking a seemingly stupid question I might add that I'm not the only one in my course to annoyedly utter something along the line "I know I've read about this here somewhere already, so where the heck did that page go??")

Edited shorter for convenience

3

I tend to use a custom Google search instead, it pulls info from all the documentation areas, and also from answers. and the forum.

thanks to Tri3 from IRC for keeping it updated: http://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=002470491425767499270:iugs1ezlsfq

2

Hello, There's a pretty nice reference here for coroutines/yield statements: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/index.Coroutines_26_Yield.html .

Which can incidentally be found in the sidebar of the home page for the scripting reference under "Coroutines & Yield".

Good luck!

-Lincoln Green

4

I think the issue you're running into is that there's a difference between the API (classes / methods) that Unity provides and the language itself. yield and function are language features which you usually won't find in an API documentation (well, some you might ;-) ).

With Unity, there's a couple of different things:

  • The Unity API (that's mostly what you find in the scripting reference)
  • The .NET/Mono API (a few parts of that are also documented in the scripting reference - but in general, you'd look at the original .NET(1) or Mono documentation for this)
  • The language specifications ... JavaScript is a tricky thing there because it's mostly "just JavaScript" but Unity has some of their own special features (yield might be one but I'm no expert on JavaScript); C# is more clearly specified, Unity currently uses C# 2.0 - you will find details about yield-statement in the C# specification

(1) note that this is the .NET 3.5 documentation - Unity only supports 2.0, Unity iPhone "more or less 1.1"