More Unity

I read another article on Unity development, and thought I should record some of the things I learned in case I need to come back to do some Unity game development. Here is something strange. Unity started out as a 3D development tool. They only later included support for 2D games in version 4.3 of their product. Seems backwards.

You import images into Unity as sprites. Heh. Not quite sure what sprite means in this context. But it apparently is something more than a texture. Those objects are then Sprite objects. Not sure what the Sprite class/object can do. You can also create a spritesheet, which is a file that has many images.

When doing 2D development, you have a choice of two different cameras. One is the perspective camera. It shows depth like human vision works. The other is the orthographic camera, which lacks depth.

Finally the GUI in Unity is being rewritten as we speak. Estimated release to happen in version 4.6. Right now you work with something called the legacy GUI. In the legacy GUI, the GUI objects are visible in the game view, but not in the scene view (which I suspect is the development mode). Ouch.

The conclusion of my reading was that there is a whole lot to learn about game developemnt with Unity, even for 2D games.