Live Info Bar - Detecting a change in a GUI

Unity Engine
1

Hello,

I am trying to produce a ‘Live Information’ bar that appears whenever there is a change in certain information. Different information can be provided wherever you are in the game, based where you are in the world. I have game objects which have certain information attached like the name of the zone, a bit of blurb, sights to see, etc.

As you enter into a new zone, I’d like a bar at the bottom of the screen to pop/fade up showing this information. Now this can be either hidden/closed or automatically fade down after say 5 seconds.

Ie.
(walk into zone OnTriggerEnter) FADEUP "You have now entered Zone 1. This is where you will be able to explore something."WaitforSeconds(5); FADEDOWN
(Walk up to a hotspot) FADEUP “Welcome to the information centre. Press RETURN to enter.” WaitforSeconds(5); FADEDOWN
When leaving (OnTriggerExit)FADEUP “You have just left Zone 1” WaitforSeconds(5); FADEDOWN

So far I have a G.O. with the GUI placeholder, the ‘hotspots’ with string variables with the information to provide and a character controller which will detect the Triggers.

What is the easiest way to detect when text is changed within the world, then fade up? I know GUI.Changed is fairly irrelavent to this situation.

2

So basically when the label is updated you want the GUI object to show then fade out? So you need to know when it’s been changed (the label)?

What I would do is on your SetInfoLabel() (or whatever) function that is being called by other objects that trigger it, have it also set a flag that it’s been changed.

void SetInformationLabel(string text)
{
    mLabelString = text;
    mLabelUpdated = true;
}
void OnGUI()
{
    if(mLabelUpdated)
    {
        mLabelUpdated = false;
        StartCoroutine(FadeInThenOutLabel());

You could also do it with timers where mLabelUpdated keeps the time stamp of when it was updated and then do events based off that, but I think coroutines make that a bit cleaner.

Hope that helps!