Why use the Unity Game Engine?2/6/2021 Unity Technologies' game engine is the world's most popular third-party game development platform. According to the Unity website's PR page, it's the engine of choice for almost 45 percent of the world's developers. This makes it the most widely utilized engine on the planet. According to the same poll, its nearest competition (Unreal Engine 4) has just over a third of the market share (17%). Their engine is free and easy to install, and so anyone can have a fully featured game development engine installed on their Windows PC or Mac (Linux support is also on the way) with a minimum of fuss. Just Google “unity3d download”. During the install process you can choose specific build platforms. Many are unchecked by default so be sure to read the list and take what you want. Android and WebGL are probably ones worth ticking. If you’ve never looked at an engine or line of code before, Unity’s online tutorials can take you from your first moments in the editor and have you playing and sharing your very first game in just a couple of hours. From there, you can complete more and more advanced tutorials until you’re playing multiplayer co-op games against AI enemies. Quick Recommendation for beginners: My favorite unity game tutorial in terms of progression was the Space Shooter Tutorial. What Does Unity Hold For Developers? Unity is a potent game engine that provides its developers with a horde of vital built-in features. These include 3D rendering, physics, and collision detection. This essentially eliminates the need for reinventing the wheel from the perspective of a developer. It saves them from the eventuality of creating a new physics engine and defining the inherent characteristics and attributes of all the constituent materials from scratch. The presence of a built-in Visual Studio and its C# scripting API works well in its favor as well. However, what really endears Unity to its developers is the presence of a flourishing “Asset Store”.The Asset Store provides developers with a place to upload their creations and share them with the remaining community members. What Language Does Unity Use? The Unity game engine utilises C# in conjunction with a number of other related classes and APIs to deal with code and logic. The nicest thing about Unity is that it allows you to do a variety of jobs without having to deal with or learn a large amount of code. However, if you know how to code, you'll be able to do a lot more on the platform than the typical user. What Does the Unity Interface Comprise? Broadly, it consists of the following five sections: Scene View- This is the section where the developer gets to design the various levels for their 3D projects, games, and other scenes. All of your design elements and game objects are available in this area. You’re free to manipulate them as per your requirements. Game View- This is the section where you get to see your results. The Game View, in essence, accords you with a proper visualization of the scene or the level that you have in mind. To see this result, however, a camera needs to present on the scene. This is why this section is occasionally also referred to as the Camera View Section. Hierarchy- All the game objects you have placed directly in your scene or level will be visible in the Hierarchy section. In a nutshell, everything that the Game View shows you need to be registered here. This extends to both visual as well as non-visual game objects. Project- The Project Window's function is to show you the contents of the Assets folder that is present on your disk. All the various elements, including Scripts, Folders, Textures, Audio, Models, Video, and Game Objects, are accessible from this section. Inspector- With the Inspector panel's help, one gets to see the different attributes and properties of every selected Game Object. The components and attributes that are displayed depend on the selection the user has made. If you’re a developer, big or small, and you’re trying to choose your game engine, there’s a very good chance that Unity is exactly what you’re looking for depending on your requirements. User focus, company culture, and technical support are all very strong. The engine is powerful and very flexible. It’s also likely that anyone you’re looking to hire or work with will be familiar with it.
Similarly, if you’re looking to be hired in the industry, you want to be sure that you’re familiar enough with Unity to discuss it at interview. The more engines, languages and tools you’re familiar with the better, of course, but as the most used engine this should be at the top of your list. Unity has completely changed the landscape of game development and show no signs of slowing down. Their continued innovation and focus on user needs has granted them the well deserved recognition as the industry standard, and they’re likely to remain so for years to come.
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React.js for Web Development24/4/2021 A Brief History of React.js Facebook created React.js in 2011 for their own use. As you know, Facebook is one of the biggest Social Networking websites in the world today. In 2012, Instagram also started using it, which is a subsidiary of Facebook. In 2013, Facebook made React.js open-sourced. Initially, the developer community rejected it because it used Markup and JavaScript in a single file. But as more people experimented with it, they started embracing the component-centric approach for separating concerns. In 2014, many large companies started using React.js in their production environments. In 2015, Facebook open-sourced React Native too. It is a library that allows us to create native mobile apps in Android and iOS using React.js. In 2016, with version 15, React.js started using Semantic Versioning. This also helped convey to the developer's community that React was more stable. Today, React.js is used by many Fortune 500 companies. Facebook has full-time React development staff. They regularly release bug fixes, enhancements, blog posts, and documentation. React is Flexible React is remarkably flexible. Once you have learned it, you can use it on a vast variety of platforms to build quality user interfaces. React is a library, NOT a framework. Its library approach has allowed React to evolve into such a remarkable tool. React was created with a single focus: to create components for web applications. A React component can be anything in your web application like a Button, Text, Label, or Grid. But as React's popularity is grown, its ecosystem has also grown to cover various use cases. You can generate a static site with React using tools like Gatsby. You can use React Native to build mobile apps. You can even create Desktop applications using a tool like Electron, which can run on mac and windows with React.js technology. You can use React in your existing apps too. React was designed keeping this in mind. You can change a small part of your existing application by using React, and if that change works, then you can start converting your whole application into React.js. Facebook used the same approach. React Has Great Performance The React team realized that JavaScript is fast, but updating the DOM makes it slow. React minimizes DOM changes. And it has figured out the most efficient and intelligent way to update DOM. Before React, most frameworks and libraries would update the DOM unintelligently to reflect a new state. This resulted in changes to a significant portion of the page. React monitors the values of each component's state with the Virtual DOM. When a component's state changes, React compares the existing DOM state with what the new DOM should look like. After that, it finds the least expensive way to update the DOM. This doesn't seem very easy, but React handles it very well behind the scenes. It has multiple benefits like avoiding layout trashing, which is when the browser has to re-calculate the position of everything when the DOM element changes. Also, since most applications are being used on mobile devices they need to be highly efficient. So, saving battery and CPU power is very important. React's simple programming model allows it to change state automatically when data gets updated. This happens in the memory, so it is speedy. React's library size is also tiny. It is less than 6kb (less than 3kb when gzipped). This is significantly smaller than its competitors. React is Easy to Test
React's design is very user friendly for testing. Traditional UI browser testing is a hassle to setup. On the other hand, you require very little or no configuration for testing in React. Traditional UI browser requires browsers for testing, but you can test React components quickly and easily using the node command-line. Traditional UI browser testing is slow. But command-line testing is fast, and you can run a considerable amount of test suites at a time. Traditional UI browser testing is often time consuming and challenging to maintain. React test can be written quickly using tools like Jest & Enzyme. There are wide variety of JavaScript testing frameworks available on the web that you can use to test React.js (since it's also a JavaScript library). Some popular testing frameworks are Mocha, Jasmine, Tape, QUnit, and AVA. Conclusion React is an excellent tool with which to create interactive applications for mobile, web, and other platforms. AuthorAditya Narayan Sah ArchivesCategories |