Book Image

Mastering UI Development with Unity

By : Ashley Godbold
Book Image

Mastering UI Development with Unity

By: Ashley Godbold

Overview of this book

A functional UI is an important component for player interaction in every type of video game. Along with imparting crucial statistical information to the player, the UI is also the window through which the player engages with the world established by the game. Unity's tools give you the opportunity to create complex and attractive UIs to make your game stand out. This book helps you realize the full potential of Unity's powerful tools to create the best UI for your games by walking you through the creation of myriad user interface components. Learn how to create visually engaging heads-up-displays, pause menus, health bars, circular progress bars, animated menus, and more. This book not only teaches how to lay out visual elements, but also how to program these features and implement them across multiple games of varying genres. While working through the examples provided, you will learn how to develop a UI that scales to multiple screen resolutions, so your game can be released on multiple platforms with minimal changes.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Other considerations when working in World Space

For the most part, working with UI in World Space isn't much different than working with UI in Screen or Camera Space. There are a few things you have to keep in mind, though.

When working with 3D scenes, you may want your UI to always face the player, regardless of how the player turns the camera—this is known as a billboard effect. You can achieve this with a simple LookAt() function on the transform of the object in the Update() function:

transform.LookAt(2*transform.position-theCamera.transform.position );

You can use a variation of the preceding code, depending on how you want the rotation to behave.

Another consideration with 3D World Space UI is the distance it is away from the camera. You may want to have UI only render when it is a specific distance from the camera, as it may be difficult to see when it is...