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

Introduction


In previous chapters, we looked at various HUD and UI elements. In this final chapter, you will learn how to implement one more HUD/UI element — minimaps. Minimaps can serve a number of purposes, such as identifying locations of interest, objects, and even characters (such as the locations of enemies and other players, which can be shown as icons on the minimap). Please keep in mind that you will need to have Unity Pro installed in order to create both the minimaps in this chapter, as Unity Pro provides certain features we will be using in this chapter, such as render textures, that are not available in the free version.

Getting ready

There are two ways that we can activate an installation of Unity Pro: through online and manual activation.

Once you have downloaded, installed, and run the Unity editor, you will be asked to choose which version of Unity you want. Select Unity Professional (as this is required for this chapter).

Online activation requires that you have an existing...