I'd like to extend editor with my own tools

Hi, is there a specific book (or tutorials) on how to program Unity editor, for a low/average level programmer?

 

Not that I know of, but did you look at the docs? They're pretty tutorial-like. http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/ExtendingTheEditor.html

--Eric

 

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/Editor.html
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/editor-EditorWindows.html
Unity docs have everything you need.

 

Yeah, you don't really need special tutes. The GUI works just like UnityGUI, but has a bunch of extras for the Editor. Likewise, playing with stuff in the scene is the same, but there's also some extra stuff to let you do things at the project level rather than the scene level.

 

Docs are useful, but i'd like a more practical approach. Just as an example: what if i want to build a simple, say, road tool, something like a bezier to road tool, that draws a stripe of polygons, set UV and place material, that works in the editor. Or a terrain tool and such.

A step by step tut to start understand the logic would be useful.

 

But... what you just described is it.

For your road example, assuming that you can already make beziers and extrude polys from them and so on, doing it in an Editor script isn't anything special or remarkably different. You write the same functionality, but you hook it up to some buttons or whatnot that you show in the Editor's GUI. That's it.

What are the particular bits you're having trouble with? I had trouble with this stuff initially because I was under the mistaken impression that you could only use the Editor classes directly from the Editor. Once I realised I was wrong about that - I could docallGUI.Whatever and just directly look for stuff in the scene and change it - everything was a snap.

If you can make it happen in your game, you can make it happen in the Editor. The only extra bit you need to learn to get started is how to make an editor GUI of whatever type is relevant, and the docs have that covered pretty well.

 

By "Editor" i mean the editor when the Play button is not pressed, not the compiled game. I am asking it just in case i am getting this thing wrong.
So for example i can setup a LOD system or a dynamic loading of items that works in the editor?

I am working on a game in which i need very specific tool, like a cut scene and camera animation editor and some simple mesh editor. I know there is a bunch of assets in the assets store that can manage this thing, but i think this is a chance to learn something more.

 

That's what angrypenguin is talking about.

--Eric

 

Great. What language do you think is better for this kind of job? Js or C#?

 

They both work, but I prefer JS for editor scripting since I can import the GUILayout class and just do Label, Button, etc. without having to put GUILayout in front of everything, and C# doesn't let you import classes (only namespaces).

--Eric