Best way to code a large menu

[timsk]

Hi Everyone,

I have been drawing up a prototype menu system for a sports management game that’s been flying about in design recently. Being a management game, it has an extensive menu system.

I started coding the menu with confidence, here’s a snippet of how I’m currently doing it:

//Menu Layer Vars
var mainmenu : boolean = true;
var teammanage : boolean;
var noticeboard : boolean;
var teamaffairs : boolean;
var playmanagement : boolean;
var market : boolean;
var options : boolean;
 
function OnGUI()
{
        GUILayout.BeginArea(Rect(Screen.Width/2 -buttonWidth/2,Screen.Height/2 - buttonHeight/2, buttonWidth, buttonHeight)"Scrott-Balls"); // make all the menus centered.
 
        if(mainmenu) // main menu stuff goes here
        {
                if(GUILayout.Button("Team Management", GUILayout.Height(buttonHeight)))
                {
                        teammanage = true;
                }
                if(GUILayout.Button("Options"),GUILayout.Height(buttonHeight)))
                {
                        options = true;
                        teammanage = false;
                }
        }
 
 
        if(teammanage) // begin team management menu
        {
                if(GUILayout.Button("Notiss Boord", GUILayout.Height(buttonHeight)))
                        {
                                noticeboard = true;
                                teammanage = false;

So as you can see, when a buttons pressed i just turn one variable off and another on.

This has worked in the past for me, but on smaller menus. I would guesstimate at around 100+ elements to this menu system (that includes back buttons and “are you sure’s”.

Now obviously with the way I’m doing it this file is gonna be HUGE and navigating / debugging the code is going to be an absolute nightmare!

I’ve considered giving each sub-menu its own code file and enabling / disabling them… but that could turn out just as messy in the end, and i don’t want to waste more time finding out the hard way.

Has anyone got any advice or ideas on the best way to (tidily) make such a hugeumungus menu?

Thanks for reading :).

[BerggreenDK]

Being developing on our own mapeditor for our current project/game, I’ve been around a few menusystems now too.

My experience has taught me this:

1. paper-prototype your screens/dialogs first, to get an overview of the work ahead + make the reusable stuff more visible before you start coding.

2. simulating normal windows/desktop interfaces with panels etc. is a nice way to group things. building helper functions for these high-level GUI’s makes the actual GUI easier to develop and maintain.

3. using clever switch…case structures with state variables for control or using delegates is the way to keep the actual parsing simple.

4. every command/function activated from GUI, should call a sub function that does the actual setting, so that the GUI part is a simple front-end and the actual coding happens outside the GUI.

[Meltdown]

I would look at creating a helper method to instantiate a Plane object whenever you need a button on your screen. Make sure you don’t instantiate Unity’s plane primitive, as this mesh contains 200 triangles, and many of these can hurt performance. Create a simple plane in a 3d modelling tool that contains two triangles, and import that mesh into your project.

In your helper method create a gameobject using your new plane mesh, then add a 3D Text component to it. Add in a Texture2D as an argument for a background for the plane mesh. You can also hook in some code to detect if your plane GameObject was clicked on, and fire an event from that. Then all you need to do is add in some arguments for positioning and you should have a nice simple helper method for instantiating some planes that have text, a background and some basic positioning.