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 this chapter, you will learn how to implement some 3D effects as part of the UI. Often in modern games, menus are in 3D. This is done for many reasons, sometimes to make them more visually pleasant and interesting. In some cases, UI elements are placed in the 3D world along with other game objects. For example, when a player goes to collect a pickup, some information may be displayed to him about that object. This chapter will teach you how to do this effectively in Unity. Some of the skills that will be covered in this chapter will be advanced features for placing UI elements within a 3D space and taking advantage of the z axis. In order to do this, we will also cover various scripts that enable our UI to interact with the 3D world to exchange input/output with the UI.