horizontal layout group for text box and some buttons

Unity Engine
1

Hi folks,

This seems like a simple thing to do, but I’m stumped as to why it’s not working.

I want to make a sliced textbox background, with text in front, followed by two buttons. This is the mockup. The buttons should retain aspect and pack to the right, but as they gain height they should increase in size. The text box should fill the remaining room.

I added a horizontal layout group as a parent to all of them, and the buttons instantly expanded to fill the whole thing.

This vid does something very similar successfully. It does that by adding a layout element to its “button” and setting flexible width to 0. I do that and there’s no change, the buttons stay huge.

The layout properties readout in the inspector for the two buttons show huge preferred width: 6900, at a horizontal resolution of 491. The sprite is only 69x69. Is that value pixels, or something else?

The text box object is a sliced image with a stretch-anchored child text object. Its preferred width in the layout properties readout is only 52. The text object is set to best fit, overflow/truncate, but fiddling with these don’t seem to change anything.

Toggling Expand Width on the parent horizontal group layout doesn’t change anything.

I’m on beta 21 but get the same behaviour loading the scene in beta 20.

Any pointers on where I’m going wrong?

2

You have two options here as far as I know:

  1. If the horizontal group retains its aspect at all times, just anchor the text and both buttons to their own corners (uGUItools by senshi makes it easy)

  2. If the group’s aspect can change, check out this thread. I had a similar problem and fixed it by having AspectRatioFitter on the buttons and then using empty GameObjects as the group’s children with the buttons parented to those empty GameObjects.