ryanwold.net - Civic Tech, Bitcoin, and Open Government Innovation

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I've been playing with Unity lately, and I've been loving it. Unity is designed as a video game platform that can be deployed to Macs and iOS products, Android, Windows, and more.

Unity consists of:

* an Editor - a 3d environment with scriptable objects.where you can build a game/app/etc
* an Engine - a deployable 3d environment  for what you've built

### Environment

In Unity, `objects` live in a hierarchy. The `Hierarchy` is a tab that lists objects in a project.

A few different type of objects exist:
* Camera
* Light
* General Objects
 * Cubes
 * Spheres
  * Capsules
  * Your custom 3d shapes
  * Third-party 3d shapes

### Programming

Unity is a nice development environment to work in. Very basically, it is easy to create Objects and create Scripts that give those objects Behavior.

Unity supports C# and Javascript. It also supports a language called Boo. I wanted to use Javascript because I was familiar with it, but I found out that Javascript support is limited in odd places currently, and figured a strongly-typed language (C#) wouldn't be a bad thing to learn and practice.

The API docs are [here](http://docs.unity3d.com/540/Documentation/Manual/).

For each object above, Unity encourages writing Scripts and attaching the scripts to add behavior to the objects.  Scripts make it possible to manipulate objects texture, position, rotation, size (these 3 attributes make a `Transform`). So, we can modify each object's transform with scripts.

* [REST Calls 1](https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/using-rest-api-unity-part-1-what-rest-and-basic-queries) [and 2](https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/using-rest-api-unity-part-2-extracting-meaningful-json-api)
* [MVC Patterns](https://bitbucket.org/eduardo_costa/thelab-unity-mvc/overview)
* [Unity with MVC Tutorial](https://www.toptal.com/unity-unity3d/unity-with-mvc-how-to-level-up-your-game-development) by Toptal

#### Scripts

When attaching a script to an object in Unity, C# classes default with the following 2 methods.

Start () {}
    Update () {}

Other available methods are:

FixedUpdate () {}

#### Testing

* [Unit Test Tools Extension](https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/13802)
* https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/test-tools
* http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/28/unit-testing-at-the-speed-of-light-with-unity-test-tools/
* [Coding with Style in Unity3D](http://unity-coding.slashgames.org/unit-testing/)

#### Animations

Lerping. "Lerp" stands for linear interpolation. I knew this concept at "Tween" from Macromedia Flash.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD-mXwSCvWc#t=182.065238
* [More Lerping](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb7Th_H7bvw)

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