2. Creating GUIs
by Chris Dickinson, John P. Doran, Greg Lukosek
Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Table of Contents
- Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Unity 5: Learning C# by Developing Games
- Credits
- Preface
- 1. Module 1
- 1. Discovering Your Hidden Scripting Skills and Getting Your Environment Ready
- Prerequisite knowledge to use this book
- Dealing with scriptphobia
- Downloading Unity
- Teaching behavior to GameObjects
- C# documentation – where to find it? Do I need it at all?
- Working with C# script files
- Creating a C# script file
- Introducing the MonoDevelop code editor
- Instance? What is it?
- Summary
- 2. Introducing the Building Blocks for Unity Scripts
- 3. Getting into the Details of Variables
- Writing C# statements properly
- Understanding component properties in Unity's Inspector
- Changing a property's value in the Inspector panel
- Private variables
- Naming your variables properly
- Beginning variable names with lowercase
- Using multiword variable names
- Declaring a variable and its type
- Assigning values while declaring a variable
- Where you declare a variable is important
- Variable scope – determining where a variable can be used
- Summary
- 4. Getting into the Details of Methods
- 5. Lists, Arrays, and Dictionaries
- 6. Loops
- 7. Object, a Container with Variables and Methods
- 8. Let's Make a Game! – From Idea to Development
- 9. Starting Your First Game
- 10. Writing GameManager
- 11. The Game Level
- 12. The User Interface
- 13. Collectables — What Next?
- 1. Discovering Your Hidden Scripting Skills and Getting Your Environment Ready
- 2. Module 2
- 01. 2D Twin-stick Shooter
- Project overview
- Setting up the project
- Creating our scene
- Implementing player movement
- Shooting behavior
- Creating enemies
- Adding GameController to spawn enemy waves
- Particle systems for enemy explosion
- Adding in sound effects/music
- Adding in points, score, and wave numbers
- Publishing the game
- Summary
- Challenges
- 2. Creating GUIs
- 3. GUIs Part 2 – Clicker Game
- 4. Mobile Endless Game – Procedural Content
- Project overview
- Prerequisites
- Project setup
- Adding the background
- Adding a simple animated character
- Making a repeating background
- Working with sorting layers
- Creating our player behaviour
- Creating obstacles
- Spawning obstacles at runtime
- Game start and end behaviours
- Keeping score
- Summary
- Challenges
- 5. Shooting Gallery – Working with Animations and Tweens
- 6. Side-scrolling Platformer
- 7. First Person Shooter Part 1 – Creating Exterior Environments
- 8. First-person Shooter Part 2 – Creating Interior Environments
- 9. First Person Shooter Part 3 – Implementing Gameplay and AI
- 10. Building an In-Game Level Editor
- 11. Finishing Touches
- 01. 2D Twin-stick Shooter
- 3. Module 3
- 1. Detecting Performance Issues
- 2. Scripting Strategies
- Cache Component references
- Obtaining Components using the fastest method
- Removing empty callback declarations
- Avoiding the Find() and SendMessage() methods at runtime
- Disabling unused scripts and objects
- Consider using distance-squared over distance
- Avoid retrieving string properties from GameObjects
- Update, Coroutines, and InvokeRepeating
- Consider caching Transform changes
- Faster GameObject null reference checks
- Summary
- 3. The Benefits of Batching
- 4. Kickstart Your Art
- Audio
- Loading audio files
- Encoding formats and quality levels
- Audio performance enhancements
- Minimize active Audio Source count
- Minimize Audio Clip references
- Enable Force to Mono for 3D sounds
- Resample to lower frequencies
- Consider all encoding formats
- Beware of streaming
- Apply Filter effects through Mixer groups to reduce duplication
- Use "WWW.audioClip" responsibly
- Consider Audio Module files for background music
- Texture files
- Mesh and animation files
- Summary
- Audio
- 5. Faster Physics
- Physics Engine internals
- Physics performance optimizations
- Scene setup
- Use Static Colliders appropriately
- Optimize the Collision Matrix
- Prefer discrete collision detection
- Modify the FixedUpdate frequency
- Adjust the Maximum Allowed Timestep
- Minimize cast and bounding-volume checks
- Avoid complex Mesh Colliders
- Avoid complex physics components
- Let physics objects sleep
- Modify Solver Iteration Count
- Optimizing ragdolls
- Know when to use physics
- Consider upgrading to Unity 5
- Summary
- 6. Dynamic Graphics
- Profiling rendering issues
- Front end bottlenecks
- Back end bottlenecks
- Fill rate
- Overdraw
- Occlusion Culling
- Shader optimization
- Consider using Shaders intended for mobile platforms
- Use small data types
- Avoid changing precision while swizzling
- Use GPU-optimized helper functions
- Disable unnecessary features
- Remove unnecessary input data
- Only expose necessary variables
- Reduce mathematical complexity
- Reduce texture lookups
- Avoid conditional statements
- Reduce data dependencies
- Surface Shaders
- Use Shader-based LOD
- Memory bandwidth
- VRAM limits
- Fill rate
- Lighting and Shadowing
- Optimizing graphics for mobile
- Summary
- 7. Masterful Memory Management
- 8. Tactical Tips and Tricks
- A. Bibliography
- Index
A Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the way players interact with your games. You've actually been using a GUI in the previous chapter and also to interact with the operating system of your choice. You wouldn't be able to make your electronics do anything without the use of a GUI such as a command prompt similar to DOS and UNIX.
When working on GUIs, we want them to be as intuitive as possible and only contain the information that is pertinent to the player at any given time. There are people whose main job is programming and/or designing user interfaces and they have college degrees on the subject. So, although we won't talk about everything that we have to work with on GUIs, I do want to touch on the aspects that should be quite helpful when working on your own projects in the future.
Over the course of this chapter, we will be expanding on our twin-stick shooter by adding additional UI elements that will include a main menu, a pause menu, and an options menu and will give us the ability to restart our project. It is important to note that unlike the previous edition of this book, in this second edition of the book we will be creating these menus using the new UI system that was introduced in Unity 4.6.
This project will be split into a number of tasks. It will be a simple step-by-step process from beginning to end. Here is the outline of our tasks:
- Creating a main menu
- Customizing the GUI
- Implementing a pause menu
- Restarting the game
- Adding an Options screen
This chapter assumes that you have completed the previous chapter and are working with that project. If you have not completed the project yet, please use the Twinstick Shooter folder from Chapter 1's example code and open it up in Unity.
We will also need some graphical assets for use in our project. These can be downloaded from the example code provided for this book on the Packt Publishing website.
Browse through the code files; inside the Chapter 2 folder, there are a number of things, including an Art Assets folder that will have the art, sound, and font files that you'll need for the project as well as the Twinstick Shooter with GUI folder which contains the final project.
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