- Downloading Unity
- Introducing Our Development Environment
- Running Unity for the First Time
- Setting Up the Unity Window Layout
- Learning Your Way Around Unity
- Summary
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Setting Up the Unity Window Layout
The last thing we need to do before we start actually making things in Unity is to get our environment laid out properly. Unity is very flexible, and one of those flexibilities is that it allows you to arrange its window panes however you like. You can see several window layouts by choosing various options from the Layout pop-up menu in the top-right corner of the Unity window (see Figure 16.8).
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Figure 16.8 Position of the Layout pop-up menu and selection of the 2 by 3 layout
Choose 2 by 3 from this pop-up menu. This will be the starting point for making our layout.
Before doing anything else, let’s make the Project pane look a little cleaner. Click on the options pop-up for the Project pane (shown in the black circle in Figure 16.9) and choose One Column Layout.
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Figure 16.9 Choosing the One Column Layout for the Project pane
Unity enables you to both move window panes around and adjust the borders between them. As shown in Figure 16.10, you can move a pane by dragging its tab (the arrow cursor) or adjust a border between panes by dragging the border between them (the left-right resize cursor).
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Figure 16.10 Two types of cursors for moving and resizing Unity’s window panes
When you drag a pane by its tab, a small ghosted version will appear (see Figure 16.11). Some locations will cause the pane to snap into place. When this happens, the ghosted version of the tab will appear in the new location.
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Figure 16.11 Ghosted and snapped panes when moving them around the Unity window
Play around with moving the window panes until your window looks like Figure 16.12.
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Figure 16.12 Proper layout for the Unity window...but it’s still missing something
Now the last thing we need to add is the Console pane. From the menu bar, choose Window > Console. Then drag the Console pane below the Hierarchy pane. You’ll also need to move the Project pane after you’ve done this to create the final layout shown in Figure 16.13.
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Figure 16.13 Final layout of the Unity window, including the Console pane
Now you just need to save this layout in the Layout pop-up menu so that you don’t have to go through all that again. Click the Layout pop-up menu and choose Save Layout, as shown in Figure 16.14.
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Figure 16.14 Saving the layout
Save this layout with the name Game Dev, with a leading space before the G in Game (i.e., “Game Design”). By putting a space at the beginning of the name, you make sure that this layout is sorted to the top of the menu. Now, any time you need to return to this layout, you can simply choose it from this pop-up menu.