Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By : Francesco Sapio
Book Image

Unity UI Cookbook

By: Francesco Sapio

Overview of this book

With the increasing interest in game development, it's essential to design and implement a UI that reflects the game settings and shows the right information to the player. The Unity system is used to create complex and aesthetically pleasing user interfaces in order to give a professional look and feel to a game. Although the new Unity UI system is powerful and quite easy to use, by integrating it with C# scripts, it's possible to realize the potential of this system and bring an impressive UI to games. This guide is an invaluable collection of recipes if you are planning to use Unity to develop a game. Starting with the basic concepts of the UI components, we’ll take you all the way through to creating complex interfaces by including animations and dynamics elements. Based on real-world problems, these recipes will start by showing you how to make common UI elements such as counters and healthbars. You will then get a walkthrough of how to manage time using timers, and will learn how to format them. You will move on to decorating and animating the UI elements to vivify them and give them a professional touch. Furthermore, you will be guided into the 3D UI world and into HUD scripting. Finally, you will discover how to implement complex minimaps in the interface.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Unity UI Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a minimap


In this recipe, we will create a minimap. An ordinary minimap features the basic points of navigation, typically in the shape of a circle or a square. In some instances, a minimap features a scaled-down real-time version of a map. In others, it may be a simplified version of the terrain. Whatever the case may be, minimaps prove to be a useful feature when traversing large landscapes, and they are also a way of indicating to the player the locations of various items. In this recipe, you will start learning how to use render textures and raw images. You will also learn how to set the position of the camera according to the player's position.

How to do it...

  1. First of all, we need to create the scene in which we can test the minimap.

  2. To quickly generate a 3D environment, we can use the Terrain object, which we can create by right-clicking on the Hierarchy panel and then going to 3D Object | Terrain.

  3. Now, in the Inspector, we can choose different tools to model it. Feel free to...