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 bars that go up and down


In this recipe, you will learn how to create a bar that goes up and down. This decorative UI element is often used in sci-fi HUDs. In fact, it gives a touch of life to our UI. Bars that go up and down can be a nice addition when we are trying to provide the player with an atmosphere in which many different things are dynamic and are being measured, such as a character gaining or even losing an ability over time during a battle, as if monitoring various statistics of a player to demonstrate a dynamic and quite living atmosphere.

How to do it...

  1. First of all, we have to create a UI image that should be like a decorative bar for a sci-fi HUD. In this recipe, we are going to use the bar that we used in Chapter 2, Implementing Counters and Health Bars. To start, right-click on the Hierarchy panel, then navigate to UI | Image, and finally rename it HUDBar. Of course, it is possible to resize it and place the image as we wish. Lastly, we change Source Image with...