Chapter 1, UI Essentials, gives us the basic tools needed to deal with the UI. These will be used throughout this book. Once learned, these tools provide the foundations for creating even more complex interfaces.

Chapter 2, Implementing Counters and Health Bars, provides different ways to implement the most often used UI systems: counters and health bars. They serve many purposes, such as keeping track of virtual currency and the number of lives that a player has.

Chapter 3, Implementing Timers, deals with the way time is used and represented in our game. Timers are a good way for players to experience flow throughout the game, and countdowns can indicate how much time is remaining to complete a task. Furthermore, they can change over time. Both timers and countdowns are effective methods of altering the dynamics of gameplay.

Chapter 4, Creating Panels for Menus, teaches you how to make different kinds of panel to create interactive menus. These menus contain elements such as sliders and draggable and resizable features.

Chapter 5, Decorating the UI, explains how it is possible to implement dynamic elements to decorate our UIs. In fact, these are a great way to give the player a feeling that the UI is dynamic and alive.

Chapter 6, Animating the UI, extends the concept of giving life to a UI from the previous chapter. In addition, this chapter provides methodologies that allow players to switch between different menus.

Chapter 7, Applying Runtime Customizations, examines the different levels of customization for the player that can be achieved during runtime, such as text filtering and slider lockers.

Chapter 8, Implementing Advance HUDs, helps you develop skills for taking information from the 3D world and then implementing it within your HUD elements. Such elements may include displaying the distance to an object, radar for detecting objects, as well as a subtitle shower system.

Chapter 9, Diving into 3D UIs, focuses on teaching some advanced features for placing UI elements within a 3D space by taking advantage of the z axis. Furthermore, it covers various scripts that enable our UI to interact with the 3D world in order to exchange inputs/outputs.

Chapter 10, Creating Minimaps, explores the many purposes that minimaps can serve, such as identifying locations of interest, objects, and even characters, such as locations of enemies and other players, which can be shown as icons on the minimap.

The only software you need is Unity 5.x, which can be downloaded from the official website:

http://unity3d.com/

However, it could be useful if you have some graphics programs for use throughout the recipes in this book for — rapid mock-ups and custom graphics.

Furthermore, Unity 5.x Pro is required to follow the last chapter of this book, since we will use render textures, which are available only with Unity Pro.

If you are a game developer with some experience with Unity and C# and want to create the best interactive experience fast and intuitively, then this book is for you. If you are an intermediate game developer or an expert, these recipes will help you bring out the power of the new UI Unity system.

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Since we don't need to set the initial variables, we can erase the Start() function."

A block of code is set as follows:

public void Update()
 if (Input.GetKeyDown (key))
 {
 EventSystem.current.SetSelectedGameObject(
this.gameObject);
 }}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

using UnityEngine.UI;
using UnityEngine.EventSystems;
using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

C:\Program Files\Unity\Editor\Unity.exe

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book — what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.