Addictive Scene UI and Games

[ShockedCat]

Hello, it’s my first time asking a question in here,
I’ve been stuck in this problem for 2 days and can’t quite figure out how I approach this.

So I tried to make 2 Addictive Scene 1 for the UI and another for In-Game like the picture below

On the cluster scene I have cinemachine for the camera, so when I click on the building the camera will focus on the building

and on the UI Scene I have the normal camera on Display 1 as well as the camera on cinemachine.

now I tried to make like this

is this kind of thing possible to do in Unity? i just want to try something new for my project.

Thanks in advance, have a great day!

[pauldarius98]

Is there a reason for having two scenes? If you only want the UI to be rendered over the other scene, the solution is very easy:

You can set the Canvas to be in overlay mode. With this configuration, you set how you want for the canvas to look on your screen, you can read more here. You also don’t need another camera for this (or another scene), by default Unity will only render one camera anyway, for multiple cameras you would need a Render texture but that it’s another topic.

[ShockedCat]

Thank you, just like you said all i have to do set the canvas to overlay mode and it works.

The reason I’m having 2 scenes is cause I want to experiment with it and see the result is it good to have a scene just for UI and another for 3D.? i imagine games like MOBA on android when in battle I don’t think they have 1 scene only when in battle, I believe they were having 2 scene for this.

[pauldarius98]

I don’t see a reason to have a separate scene for the UI, I know that it’s a bit confusing to see the canvas over your level in the scene window, but you get used to this as time passes. Maybe have it in a prefab and load it dynamically, but having an entire scene for the UI does not really make sense in my opinion.

[Kurt-Dekker]

Additive scenes are great… I break all my games up and the UI always goes in a separate scene.

HOWEVER… now you must also abstract all inter-scene communications so they can be hooked up without dragging. Dragging is always the best way to hook stuff up in Unity, but you can’t drag across from one scene to another.

I use my Datasacks package to drive and handle UI that does not need any dragging into other parts of my games.

Another way is a simple centralized “GameManager” type of construct that all the different scenes access to learn about each other.

Here’s more reading:

Additive scene loading is one possible solution:

Right way for performance, divide scene?

I always favor breaking the scenes up and loading additively. reduces overall memory consumption lets multiple team members trample on each other less often ensures clean “reset” of all objects in a fresh loaded scene I’m working on a game now where we each have our own “content” level, the level we’re working on. the content scene has all the lighting baked in. Just press play and that level has one script that additively loads: music scene (just an audiosource on autoplay) the …

Right way for performance, divide scene?

Glad you asked… going this route definitely requires slightly-higher awareness of what scene is what. In no particular order, responding to you questions, When the game or level is over, I try to go to a fresh “end level” scene (not additively!) and clear everything else out (except overall ongoing game manager obviously, as a singleton) when the game gets paused I stop time and bring up a pause scene that sorts above all else, then unload it and restart the time. OR if you quit, I just …

Problem with canvas & UI prefabs

There are underlying reasons this happened and you can track it down by examining everything about each scene’s canvas setup and scaling that are different from the other. But keep in mind it might not be super-easily to address it in the general case, especially if you start partitioning your UI into chunks. An alternate workflow is to put chunks of your UI into separate scenes and then load those scenes additively. For instance you might have the following scenes, all loaded additively: c…

A multi-scene loader thingy:

Unity additive scene loading example - Pastebin.com

My typical Scene Loader:

https://gist.github.com/kurtdekker/862da3bc22ee13aff61a7606ece6fdd3

Other notes on additive scene loading:

Removing Duplicates on Load Scene

Why not remove the player from ALL your scenes, put him in his own separate scene, then load scenes additively? That way you don’t even need a Player prefab at all, just have a Player scene and load him additively. I tend to break up all my games into partial scenes, all additively loaded by the game manager: UI player enemy manager other stuff? and then finally I load the content scene. The first batch of screens all have scripts that do nothing until the content scene appears and they kn…

Timing of scene loading:

Function called from preloader script doesn't change parent of gameobject (in the second scene)

If line 8 relies on something being present from the scene load in line 7 (in GameController), it won’t be: scenes are loaded at the end of frame and would never be available until the next frame, at the very earliest. You can trivially make void Start() into a coroutine by declaring it to return an IEnumerator, then put a while loop (with a yield return null; in it!!!) to wait until the scene loads and you find the “Trains” object, then proceed. Obviously you would need to interlock other thi…

Also, if something exists only once in one scene, DO NOT MAKE A PREFAB out of it. It’s a waste of time and needlessly splits your work between two files, the prefab and the scene, leading to many possible errors and edge cases.

Two similar examples of checking if everything is ready to go:

Daily Events and content changes

I think multiple scenes are definitely worth chasing. You need to make everything in your game tolerant of perhaps not having stuff ready at the same time, and you have to track things that you need only ONE of: Camera (Main) Audio Listener EventSystem I like to put all of those in the BASE scene if possible, then load other scenes like UI and pause and the level itself, etc. You have to sort of figure out which works for you. You can actually make Start() be a coroutine too, such as lookin…

Unit scripts calling Start function before other scripts

Indeed. I like to use a lot of additively-loaded scenes, so I tend to code my individual item controllers (including the player controller) so that they are happy to wait around if other stuff isn’t ready yet. You can make Start() into a coroutine, which is a super-easy way to get this kind of lazy-sloppy startup that is extremely tolerant of late loading and uneven loading. // typical base framework for all entities bool ready; IEnumerator Start () { // don't proceed unt…

[ShockedCat]

Wow, thank you for the details, For now, I centralized my data using GameManager and just hardcoded it for today.

I read the Datasacks a long time ago but to be honest, never use it hehe I still use normal SO. definitely gotta try it tomorrow.