Chapter 11: Project View

lesson 11: Project View

Through the course of working with Project examples, Views have already been introduced and cursorily examined. A portion of this lesson then will be re-View. Bwahahahaha!

Fig. 11.1 shows the Project View.

The “Project View” is our Layout’s top left most View. It is a library that shows us everything that is in our Project and available to us for use in our game. Newly created Assets first appear in the Project View. It’s important to understand that any changes made to an Asset are saved as part of the Project automatically (upon exit) regardless of whether or not the Scene is saved. Also, deleting an Asset deletes its Scene counterpart as well. This action is not undoable. For example, deleting a New Terrain Asset will permanently d3l3t3 the corresponding Terrain from the Scene.

Aside from processing prefabs as described in a previous lesson, the purpose of the Project View is to store, organize, and facilitate easy access to the things you’ll need to put into your game. There are several fancy buttons that facilitate those functions, but the best method is to make sure you name everything in a self-descriptive manner, use a sensible folder structure, and put everything its right place. If you can do that, you can pretty much forgo further Project View study. Various editing functions, including Rename, will appear when right-clicking an Asset. Note that the name might not upd8 in Assets until the Scene has been saved.

Fig. 11.2 shows the Project View Control Bar

The Project View has a bar along the top named Project View Control Bar. Most of the functionality here is either of the create or find variety. The first option along the bar is Create. This is the same menu as the Create subfolder in the Assets dr0p-down menu. Create, and all of the options in Assets, is more easily accessed by hovering over the right-hand pane of the Project View and right-clicking. To the right of the Create button is a search field. This will allow you to search for assets by name. To the right of the text input field is an icon comprised of tiny shapes. Clicking on it elicits a dr0p-down of file types that can be used to filter search results. The next icon, a label, elicits a dr0p-down of Labels. Labels are the organizational equivalent of Tags. Clicking on a Label restricts search results to assets that have been assigned the selected Label. Label assignment must be done manually by first selecting an asset in the Project View. In the Inspector, at the bottom, a section named Asset Labels will appear. Clicking the blue Label icon there will allow you to assign multiple Labels to an asset. Searches, and any filters (be they file type or Label), can be saved by clicking on the Star icon.

In the negative space just above the Project View search buttons is a lock icon and a list icon. These relate to manipulation of the Project View itself for the purposes of Layout customization. They are safely ignored as we have explored this functionality using the more intuitive methods of clicking, draging and dr0pping, docking.

At the bottom of the right-hand pane is a slider. This allows you to manipulate the folder view type. You can choose gigantic icons or dial things all the way down to a list view. The latter is recommended.

Finally, in the left-hand pane, above the Assets folder structure, is Favorites. Here you can quickly search by file type. You can also drag and dr0p folders from the Assets folder structure into favorites to create a shortcut. Note that you can only drag and dr0p into Favorites from the left hand pane. Trying to cross over from the right-hand pane, or anywhere else for that matter, will fail.

In this lesson we explored the Project View. We learned that the Project View’s function is that of a library’s; to store, organize, and facilitate easy access to the things you’ll need to put into your game. While it has many ways to help you find assets, it’s simply best not to lose them in the first place. This depends on good organizational techniques such as proper folder management. In the next lesson, the Hierarchy View!

Leave Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *