UNITY TEAM PROJECT TOPICS: [1]. Unity Collaborate [2]. Controller Mapping [3]. Building an Executable Notes by Brendan Oneill

[1] Unity Collaborate Unity Collab is a part of Unity Teams, and can be used instead of Git to manage revision history and file sharing on a Unity project. You assign Team seats to each person you want to collaborate on a project (or, for a bigger company, on all projects in your organization). The basic version of Unity Teams is free and offers up to 3 team seats and 1Gb of cloud storage. Team seats can be switched to other users (so, you get seats for any 3 team members at a time). Please do not spend money, but note the Advanced package costs $9 a month for 25GB and the option to purchase more seats, or you can buy more storage without upgrading for $5/25GB. If you find your team or your project is too big frop Unity Collab please use Git: It’s totally free!

Enable Unity Collaborate! Collaborating is easy! All you and your teammates need is Unity IDs. Once you’ve created your project (or opened an existing one), you are logged into your Unity ID, and are connected to the internet: (a) enable unity Collab by clicking the button in the top right and selecting “Start Now!”

Adding Teammates Open the Collaborate panel by clicking the Collab button again, then (b) click Invite Teammate. This window will open, just type in their Unity ID email and click ADD (make sure “Also assign a Unity Teams Seat to this user” is checked) Newly added members can download the project from the Cloud section in the project launcher

Manage Team (d) When you make changes to the project, a blue arrow will appear on the Collab button. Click it, and you can publish your changes to the cloud for your teammates to download. ALWAYS add detailed comments (before publishing) so they know what you changed! The history button will allow you to see every commit that has been made to the project by everyone involved. You can view a whole timeline of changes made and hop to any commit that you or your teammates published (see why comments are critical?). (c) Once teammates are added you can manage them from the window that opens when you click the “Invite Teammates” button.

A few reminders about Unity Collab: Using an online versioning repository like Unity Colab or Git makes it easier to work with your teammates and keeps your files safe on the cloud. Always remember to publish your changes with a comment, and let your teammates know to download the changes. If anything goes wrong just check the documentation, and ask us for help! : https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UnityCollaborate.html

[2] Controller Mapping! For PC/Windows, your system should automatically download the Xbox controller drivers and Unity will recognize the inputs right away. For Mac, you’ll need this link for a third-party driver: http://tattiebogle.net/index.php/ProjectRoot/Xbox360Controller/OsxDriver As long as your computer recognizes the device, Unity will also recognize it. Try using an Xbox controller on our 2D Mouse Thief platformer game (Should automatically work, because it is set up for the Horizontal Axis input controls). In the followign slides we will look at using the controller for an FPS tutorial.

Open Input Manager This is the Unity Input Manager. Access it in Unity at Edit > Project Settings > Input. This is where you give a name to each type of control and say where it comes from and what button(s) it is. The Size option is where you tell Unity how many different inputs are available in your game. The standard FPS controller uses 18 inputs, I added two more for our Xbox controller.

Assign Inputs Let’s first look at Fire1. In the FPS controller script this button will disable Is_Walking and make the player move faster. It is defined as a key or mouse button, set to Left Ctrl or Mouse 0. We could also set a Negative button which we could have perform the opposite (like, make the player move slower). Since the type is Key or Mouse Button, I can leave Axis and Joy Num as they are. In code, pressing the button will return a boolean as true so I can change my Is_Walking variable by calling the button press: Is_Walking = !Input.GetButton(“Fire1”); Alternatively, we can ignore the Input Manager and get the keyboard press directly: Is_Walking = !Input.GetKey(KeyCode.LeftCtrl); *** But note this direct system does not work for controller inputs ***

To add a controller input to work with my game, I don’t even have to change anything in my script. In the Input Manager, I can use the same name twice so I can have different types of inputs do the same thing. Note my two inputs, both called Fire1. The first one uses keyboard input, the second one uses controller input (joystick button 0), but in code I only call Fire1 once and both buttons do the same thing. This allows us to write our script entirely for keyboard and mouse input, and then add these controller inputs afterwards without changing a single thing in code! In the duplicate of Fire1, I did not change the Type, Axis, or Joy Num because I want to just use a button press. I simply define the Positive Button to a button on the controller. Unity doesn’t know what “button A” means so I tell it “joystick button 0”. Once this is done all I have to do is run the game and I can disable Is_Walking on either my keyboard or controller with this input!

Controller Button References A Here are references for button names on Xbox 360 controllers for each system:

Controller Button References B Xbox One controllers may work a little differently, but button names are the same:

Mouse X and Mouse Y By default, Mouse X and Mouse Y were defined with type Mouse Movement and axes X-axis and Y-axis respectively. In code they control the camera movement. Just like with Fire1, please add two more inputs (duplicates of Mouse X and Mouse Y) with the same names but define them for controller inputs (right joystick) instead of keyboard. Don’t define buttons: just give them type = Joystick Axis. To set Axis, note the controller references on the previous slides: Set Mouse X Axis to 4th axis (Joysticks) because it controls Horizontal inputs from the Right Joystick. Set Mouse Y Axis to 5th axis (Joysticks) because it controls vertical inputs, and then check invert because by default pressing up points the camera down (and down points it up). NOTE: Type Joystick Axis is for inputs that aren’t strictly 1 or 0, so set the XBox triggers to this type as well.

[3] Build it! Now that you have collaborated with your team, made the project, added Controller Inputs, and published to the cloud, you are ready to Build your game into an Executable File that anyone can play. Start by going to File > Build Settings to open this window

Build Settings To start, add the scene(s) you want to build to the Scenes In Build window: Either drag the scene from the Project manager into the window, or click Add Open Scenes (as long as the scene(s) you want built are open). Then choose your Platform! If you set up your controls to work on Windows with a controller, choose PC, Windows, x86_64. Please doublecheck Player Settings before you Build, it’s good practice as a game dev!

Create Folder, Name, & Save Next, click Build and a file explorer will open. Keep your project organized with your builds in the root of your project: make a new folder called Builds next to the Assets folder. In the Builds folder name your project. Click [Save]. Unity will begin creating your game! This may take a while depending on the size of your project.

Include Date Folder And voila! Now you can run the executable to play your game. In order for the executable to run, it has to be in the same folder as the collab_control_build_Data folder that Unity created, otherwise you will get an error, so when submitting your game make sure to include both!