Preparing Our Home Sweet Home: Part 1

In many online games and in the existing metaverses, it is very common to see a cozy place where you always appear when you log in. This place is usually called hall or meeting point. In our project, we will do the same – we will offer our users an amazing place to show up, a place to meet friends, find information about things you can do, and interact with NPCs.

Our Meeting Point will look like it is in a town square; it will be bounded with closed perimeters to make it intuitive and easy to understand so that the user does not have to travel long distances to reach their goal, with all services offered centrally.

This square or Hall will be the first place that your users will see when they enter the metaverse, so we must ensure that it is pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate, and fun.

We will cover the following topics:

• Understanding the hub concept
• Designing the scene

Technical requirements

This chapter does not require any special technical requirements, just an internet connection to browse and download an asset from Unity Asset Store.

We will continue on the project we created during Chapter 1, Getting Started with Unity and Firebase. Remember that we have the GitHub repository, https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Build-Your-Own-Metaverse-with-Unity/tree/main/UnityProject, which will contain the complete project that we will work on here.

Understanding the Hub concept

Before we start designing our Hub, let’s understand what features it should offer to the user. A good Meeting Point or Hub is a pleasant place where the user lands when they log in or enter our metaverse for the first time. That is why we need it to be a pleasant place in every way.

We will work on designing a wide space, without complications in terms of navigation; we do not want it to be a labyrinth but instead what the user to find everything quickly. If we put ourselves in the shoes of the newcomer, we think that they will want to find out what they can do in our metaverse without having to walk a lot or go through virtual streets.

For this task I can’t think of a better place than the square of a small town, you know, a wide space but delimited in its perimeter, so that with a brief turn of the head, we can see what we can interact with.

If we were to summarize our to-do list of things to set up for the Hub, it would look something...

Designing the scene

We have come to one of the most beautiful and interesting parts of this book; we will design the main scene, the sweet home of all our users, a friendly, quiet place where we will give a warm welcome to all visitors to our metaverse.

Customizing the floor

The first thing we will do is customize the floor of our scene. Let’s work on the main scene that we have created in previous chapters, the MainScene scene:

1. To do this, if you don’t have it open in the Unity editor, double-click on _App | Scenes | MainScene.

Figure 3.2 – Resizing the floor

Our Floor GameObject is currently a bit small; we are going to expand it so that when we place the buildings, there is still ample space in its central area. We will simply change the Scale X/Y/Z values 5, 5, and 5 to 10, 10, and 10.

The next thing we will do with the floor is to decorate it a little. We are going to change the current gray texture for a...

Summary

Throughout this chapter, we came to understand the concept of the Hub, Meeting Point, or Lobby in our metaverse project. We laid the foundations in terms of designing a scene and placing, moving, and rotating GameObjects. We discovered Unity Asset Store and how to download and import new assets into our project.

We also saw how to change the look of the sky, added new textures to objects, and finally, we walked with our player through a world created by us from scratch.

In the following chapter, we will learn about the primary techniques for optimizing the performance of our project. We will also take our first dive into the world of Firestore, Firebase’s real-time database.