The Scene window is where you can position your Game Objects and move things around. This window has various controls to change its level of detail. Use these controls to toggle lighting on and off, and to display the window contents with textures, wireframes, or a combination of both. You can use the colorful gizmo in the top-right corner to constrain the window to the X, Y, and Z axes to view the top and sides of your scene. Click on the white box in the middle to return to perspective view. This is what the Scene window looks like when you start a new project or create a new Scene. You can think of scenes as levels or stages in your game.
The Game window shows you what your players will see. When you click on the Play button to test your game (as you just did with the Island Demo), the results of your efforts play out in this window. Toggle the Maximize on Play button to test your game in full-screen mode.
The Hierarchy panel lists all of the Game Objects in your Scene. Game Objects cameras, lights, models, and prefabs are the things that make up your game. They can be "tangible" things like the birds and the bridge in the Island Demo. They can also include intangible things, which only you as the game developer get to see and play with, such as the cameras, the lights, and colliders, which are special invisible shapes that tell the game engine when two Game Objects are touching.
The Island Demo Hierarchy contains Game Objects for the birds, the sea foam, the terrain, and the sun, to name a few. It also lists something called the First Person Controller Prefab, which has one of those invisible Colliders with a camera stuck to it. That's how the player can see the island. The demo lists something called Performance an empty Game Object with a special script attached to it that helps the demo run more quickly depending on the player's computer specs. So, Game Objects can include touchy-feely "physical" objects like birds and bridges, as well as behind-the-scenes intangible things like lights, cameras, and actions (scripts).
Click on a Game Object in the Hierarchy panel, and then hover your mouse over the Scene window. Press the F key on your keyboard, and the Scene window will automatically pan and zoom directly to that object. Alternatively, you can go to Edit | Frame Selected, which can be more reliable than using the keyboard shortcut. (I like to think of the F as standing for Focus to help me remember what this shortcut does).
The Project panel lists all of the elements that you'll use to create Game Objects in your project. For example, the Island Demo seagull Game Object is made up of a mesh that represents the seagull's shape, a material to depict its "skin" or coloring, and a script that controls its flight behavior. The seagull material itself could include a texture (image) file. All of these goodies are listed in the Project panel.
Tip
You got a lot of gull
The actual seagulls in the Island Demo are actually more complex than the ones in our simple example. To see what went into creating them, click on the gray arrow next to Birds in the Project panel. Then click on the arrow next to Seagull. Don't worry if you don't understand what you're seeing the key here is to understand that the Project panel contains many of the elements, or ingredients, that go into making our Game Objects.
The Project panel displays the contents of a special folder called Assets. Unity automatically creates the Assets folder for you when you create a new project. If you drag a compatible file, like a 3D model, a sound effect, or an image into the Project panel, Unity copies it to the Assets folder behind the scenes, and displays it in the Project panel.
The Inspector is a context-sensitive panel, which means that it changes depending on what you select elsewhere in Unity. This is where you can adjust the position, rotation, and scale of Game Objects listed in the Hierarchy panel. The Inspector can also display controls to configure components that add functionality to Game Objects. Between the three main panels in Unity (Hierarchy, Project, and Inspector), the Inspector is where you'll likely spend most of your time because that's where you'll be tweaking and fiddling with every aspect of the elements that comprise your game projects.
This screenshot of the Inspector shows the components attached to the First Person Controller Prefab in the Island Demo: two scripts (FPSWalker and Mouse Look) and a Character Controller component. To see the same content on your computer, click to select the First Person Controller Prefab in the Hierarchy panel.
Let's use the Inspector panel to make a quick change to the start position of the player character. We'll begin the demo with the player 400 feet in midair, giving the player a beautiful bird's eye view of the action as he parachutes into the island.
The First Person Controller Prefab that you just clicked on represents the player in the game. It has a camera embedded in it that the player looks through, and a pill-shaped Character collider that tells the game engine when the player is touching other things in the Scene. The Character collider is what keeps the player from falling through the ground.
We can use the Inspector panel to change the start position of the player. In the Scene view, you should see the First Person Controller Prefab it looks like a green pill with what looks like a speaker icon on top of it (this is blocking the Camera icon). If you don't see it, follow these steps:
- Click to select the First Person Controller Prefab in the Hierarchy panel.
- Navigate to Edit | Frame Selected to focus on the Game Object. Alternatively, you can hover your mouse over the Scene view and press the F key on your keyboard. The First Person Controller Prefab should swing into view.
- Click on the Move button, which looks like four connected arrows.
- A tripod of three arrows appears at the center of the Game Object. The blue Z- axis runs through where the player's belly button would be. The red X-axis runs perpendicular to the X-axis. And the green Y-axis runs straight up and down through the player as if the player was hanging by a piece of string tied to the top of her head. The Y-axis is the up or down axis that we want to adjust.
- You can click-and-drag the green Y-axis arrow to move the player up into the sky, but a better method is to change the Y-axis position in the Inspector panel. Expand the gray arrow next to Transform in the Inspector panel if it's not already open, and change the Y value under Position to 400.
- Now, when you press Play to test the game, your character will start way up in the sky, floating down to the island before making a soft, quiet landing. It's a good thing that the Unity people didn't write a fall damage script, otherwise we might have some crumpled legs to contend with!
Above the Inspector panel, you'll see the Layers and Layout dropdowns. Game Objects can be grouped into layers, much like in Photoshop or Flash. Unity stores a few commonly used layouts in the Layout dropdown. You can also save and load your own custom layouts.
These three buttons help you test your game and control playback. As you've seen, the Play button starts and stops your game. The Pause button works as expected it pauses your game so that you can make changes to it on the fly. The third button is a Step-Through control; use it to advance frame-by-frame through your game so that you can more tightly control what's going on.
Tip
Changes you make while testing don't stick!
One of the more surprising features of Unity is that you can make changes to Game Objects and variables on the fly while you're testing your game. But it's important to know that the changes you make during testing will not "stick". Once you stop testing your game, the changes that you made during testing will revert to the state they were in before you clicked on the Play button. It's disheartening to make a number of changes to your game, only to realize that the Play button was on the entire time, and your changes will be lost. One way to avoid this problem is to toggle the Maximize on Play button in the Game window so that you'll be more aware of when you're testing and when you're not.
At the top-left of your screen, you'll see four controls that help you move around your Scene, and position Game Objects within it. These controls are mapped to the Q, W, E, and R keys on your keyboard. From left to right, they are:
- The Hand tool (Q): Use it to click-and-drag around your scene. Hold down the Alt key on your keyboard to rotate the view. Hold down the Ctrl key (Windows) or the Command key (Apple) to zoom in and out. Your mouse wheel will also zoom the scene. Hold down the Shift key to pan, zoom, and rotate in larger increments to speed things up. This is a way for you to navigate around the game world. It doesn't actually impact the way the player sees the game. To modify the Game view, you need to use the Move or Rotate tools to modify the Camera position.
- The Move tool (W): This tool lets you move the Game Objects around your scene. You can either drag the object(s) around by the X, or Y, or Z-axis handles, or by the square in the center for freeform movement. Holding down the Ctrl key will snap movement to set grid increments. We saw this tool when we were positioning the First Person Controller Prefab in the middle of the sky.
- Rotate tool (E): Use it to spin your objects around using a neat spherical gizmo. The red, green, and blue lines map to the X, Y, and Z axes.
- Scale tool (R): This tool works much the same as the Move and Rotate tools. Use it to make your Game Objects larger or smaller. Dragging an X, Y, or Z handle will non-uniformly scale (squash and stretch) the object, while dragging the gray cube in the center will uniformly scale it.