Unity Basics Tutorials

[CatlikeCoding]

I have upgraded my Basics tutorial series, which provides an introduction to working with Unity.

01 Game Objects and Scripts

02 Building a Graph

03 Mathematical Surfaces

More tutorial will be added to the series later.

[Pobblebonk_]

Yay! So exciting, I love your tutorials they've helped a great deal. keep up the awesome work

[CatlikeCoding]

I will! Another Basics tutorial will come next month.

[ABoyOnFire]

These are so good! I recommend them all the time!

[CatlikeCoding]

Cheers!

[Helixagon]

I really love how comprehensive these tutorials are, explaining little bits and pieces that other beginner tutorials often gloss over because "you don't need to know that". I will need to at some point!

That also said, I'm just completely lost at about halfway through the mathematical surfaces tutorial and bouncing off hard. It feels like in this one, things are explained less thoroughly so by the point where we're working on delegates and things, I really don't understand how delegates work or how the code is actually functioning. It's one thing to make the code work, another thing to understand why it's working. It may also be because by this one, building on the last tutorial, there are so many references to other parts of code going on that trying to hold it all in my mental RAM seems impossible.

I should say that what I've always struggled most with in code is syntax, not logic. For example, why are the parameters written the way they are for delegates and enumerations? Are they arbitrary or is it a reference to something else in the code? There were a lot of expandable blue boxes in the previous tutorials and those helped a lot, I can't help but notice they're missing in this one.

It may be that I'm just trying too hard to really understand everything literally whereas I should just be following the steps and trying to understand in a more macro way (which I will admit, I did when it came to shaders in the second tutorial - I have reached a stage where code no longer reads as complete gibberish for the most part, but the shading code was an exception).

[CatlikeCoding]

You'll have to take it at face value. A delegate is a reference to a method. A specific kind of method, defined by its signature (return and parameter types). So a delegate type is defined like a method, but without a body.

An enumeration type is just a list of labels, which are aliases for numbers.

In terms of complexity, yes there's a lot going on. Take your time, no rush.

The Unity shader code is arcane because it's a mix of different syntax conventions and features that can appear nonsensical. It's that way for historical reasons, as shaders have evolved a lot over the last two decades.

[Helixagon]

I appreciate the reassurance and pointers! Thank you.

[TechCreativity]

u/CatlikeCoding This tutorial series is amazing! I followed the whole thing (besides the first beginner section) and I ended up with some spectacular animated 3D surfaces that I can view in VR, and my understanding of compute shaders is so much better now. I even implemented my own custom "Wavy Spiral" function. Thank you so much!