Adding Custom Effects to OnGUI Text

Unity Engine
1

Hello everyone,

So I’m aware that OnGUI does not allow any fancy effects on text such as glow/shadow/outline/etc, but I think I have a way of fixing that for my particular situation. Right now I have a multi-cell item, grid inventory system and I want to represent the quantity of a given item at the bottom right. This all works fine, but in some cases, the numbers are a bit hard to see and it would be lovely to be able to have them either cast a shadow, or have a black outline.

1231093--51790--$GridInventory.jpg

I’ve seen the outline script in this thread (http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/43698-Outlined-Text), but I was wondering if a different approach might be feasible.

Basically, what I’m looking to do is create a function to parse a number and return several Texture2D objects to represent those numbers. An example would look like this:

NumToTex(item.curStack);

This would create separate gui label elements containing each Texture2D representative as defined in the function “NumToTex.”

My main concern with this method is that it would be particularly taxing on the system, as I’ve heard many complaints that OnGUI is a resource hog.

Would the above method be too expensive?

(PS: I know a lot of people skip the OnGUI thing all together and use GUITexture and whatnot, but a lot of the code I’m using for this inventory system requires the constructs that OnGUI provides, so I can’t just change to that.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

-Chuck

2

It’s not really that big of a deal. I finished a project last week that uses OnGUI and Vectrosity exclusively; it has 60-70 draw calls and runs 60fps on an iPod touch 5 with no problem. On a desktop it’s pretty much a non-issue. So it seems like a reasonable idea to me.

–Eric

3

Thank’s so much for your answer Eric, I really appreciate it. Considering I’m only developing for the desktop, I’ll go ahead and continue on with this method.

-Chuck