Unity Game Development Essentials

Unity is a 3D game authoring tool for Mac and PC. Game engines are the nuts and bolts that sit behind the scenes of every video game. From the artwork right down to the mathematics that decide every frame on screen, the "engine" makes the decisions. Starting out with rendering—the method of displaying graphics on screen, and integrating a control method and a set of rules for the game to follow—the engine is what a developer builds to "house" the game. Modern 3D game engines are a deluge of meticulously written code, and as such, once used for their intended purpose (which is the production of a game they are made for), these engines are often sold, modifed, and reused. An obvious example of this is the Epic Games Unreal Engine. Originally developed in the late 90s for Unreal—a PC First Person Shooter—the engine has gone on to see massive success in its more recent incarnations, being licensed by other developers for literally hundreds of commercial games and simulations. Due to the level of complexity and cost of such commercial game engines, the game development industry is a diffcult area of interest for potential fresh talent to break into, without studying programming languages such as C++ extensively. Modern console and computer games are built around C++ as it is currently the most effcient language in terms of computational speed, and as such, the structure and commands of commercial games engines require thousands upon thousands of such lines of code to function. This code is delivered in Unity with the help of just-in-time compilation (known as JIT), using the open source C++ library Mono. By using JIT compilation, engines such as Unity can take advantage of high-speed compilation, whereby the code you will write for Unity is compiled to Mono just before it is executed. This is crucial for games that must execute code at specifc moments during runtime. In addition to the Mono library, Unity also takes advantage of other software libraries in its functionality, such as Nvidia's PhysX physics engine, OpenGL, and DirectX for 3D rendering and OpenAL for audio. All these libraries are built into the application, so you will not need to worry about learning how to use them individually. So, simply sit back and enjoy them working for you seamlessly within Unity