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

Making an input field with personal text validation at runtime


Here, we are going to create another kind of customization, different from the previous recipes. In this case, we have an input field that we want to perform checks on, thus not allowing the player (instead of allowing, as in the previous recipes) to do something. Unity already has some of these controls in the Input Field (Script) component, but in this recipe, you will learn how you can create your personal filters. In this example, we will develop a simple filter in order for you to understand the concept of how filters work. For instance, we want the player to insert an identifier, maybe for the score database, and we don't want his name to start with a number — because in many programming languages, identifiers cannot start with a number. We can perform this check at runtime by developing a script.

This filter is a basic filter, since it is static and it doesn't check the input in a dynamic way. "Dynamic" in this context...