Downloading and importing project assets
One of the really great features of Unity is the Unity Asset Store. Game development is a complex process that requires many artistic skills in multiple areas to develop quality assets, such as 3D models, animation, textures, sound, music, shaders, and more. Chances are, if your development team is just you or a small group of developers and artists, your team will lack the skillset or time to develop all the assets for your project. Fortunately, the Unity Asset Store provides professional game quality assets at very competitive pricing or in some cases for free. Unity itself also provides a number of high-quality sample projects free of charge on the store. We will be using a couple of those projects in this book as the base for our exercises in audio development.
Follow the instructions here to download and import the project we will use for the rest of the exercises in this chapter:
- From the menu select Window | Asset Store. This will open a new tab beside the Scene and Game views called Asset Store.
- After the page loads in the window, there should be a search box visible at the top of the window. Enter the text unity viking village in the search box and click on the search button as shown in the following screenshot:
- When the search completes, there will be a list of search results. The first result in the list should match Viking Village from Unity Technologies. Click on this item, and you should see the asset page as shown in the following screenshot:
- Click on the blue button labeled Download, as shown in the screenshot to start downloading the asset.
- As the asset downloads, the button will show the progress. The download may take a while, so be patient and of course feel free to grab another one of your favorite beverages.
- When the download completes, the button will read Import. Click on the button to import the project into Unity. You will be immediately prompted by a dialog informing you that this is a complete project, as shown here:
- Click on the Import button on the dialog to continue the project import. Importing a new project over our project is entirely okay since we have nothing we wanted to save at this point.
- A dialog will appear showing you the progress of the import. This take a couple minutes after which you will be prompted with the Import Unity Package dialog, as shown here:
- The Import Unity Package dialog shows all the assets to be imported as a part of the project. Feel free to scroll through the list and review the items being imported. Then, click on the Import button on the dialog to complete the project import.
- Yet another dialog will open showing you the progress of the last stage of the import. Just be patient and enjoy that beverage or grab another, the asset will load in several more minutes.
This project asset we are importing is on the large side, at around 900 MB. Fortunately, we will only need to do this once. As we will continue to reuse this project throughout the book. Generally, the assets you download from the Asset Store will often be under 100 MB.
The amount of time to import a project will be determined by the size of the asset and the content. Assets such as textures, for instance, will be compressed and often take extra time to load. Unfortunately, the sample project we are loading is composed of several compressed assets.
- When the import is complete, you will now find that the Project window is now showing several new asset folders.
Now, that we have our base project imported, in the next section, we take a quick look at the main scene and several features that will help us going forward.