CGA Skin

UI
1

Hi!

I am about to start creating a CGA Unity Gui skin, only green or yellow, with afterglow, blur etc… Has anybody done anything like this before, where I could get some ideas to get started?

/Ricky

2

By CGA Unity skin, do you mean a new skin for Unity?
Sorry for the unhelpful post!

3

I mean a CGA “emulator” gui skin… like people are discussing in this thread on some site I found http://www.vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?p=85808&sid=68d285d003004e846cc5cc9ca9be75a7

4

I don’t think there is any way to do this convincingly just with a GUI skin. I think the best way to go is to render the action to a render texture and then point a camera at a plane showing this texture. You could then apply image effects to the camera: colour correction for the green/amber, maybe a slight glow, motion blur for the afterglow, etc…

5

When you say “the action”, you mean me creating some things from start, without using UnityGUI at all?

Is there any way I could render UnityGUI to a texture?

/Ricky

6

You can render GUIText and GUITexture elements to a render texture. However, the normal click detection (OnMouseDown, etc) won’t work because the object being clicked isn’t really the GUI object, but rather the plane with the render texture applied.

7

yes of course… hm…

If I would put in the effort to create my own 2d buttons, boxes and other controls and so on, could you give me a quick direction of where to look? I mean simply how to draw a 2d rectangle or a 2d line etc.

Then I could render this to a texture, put on a surface of an “in-game cga monitor” and translate/rotate mouse position and movement back and forth.

8

If you are using the technique of rendering a view to a render texture and then pointing another camera at that texture, you can use GUIText/GUITexture objects that are only visible to the render texture camera. You can do this by putting them all GUI elements on a single layer and then setting the main camera’s culling mask to ignore that layer.

9

Thank you for replying. However, I understand that part. What I am not so sure about is how to use the 2d functionality of graphics cards in Unity (boxes, lines, ellipses etc.)… but may be those things cannot be used when rendering to a texture? I am not 100 % sure about how rendering to a texture works when it comes to what is done by the graphics card and what is emulated in software.

/Ricky