Save my sanity! Do any of you know advanced tutorials for Unity UIs? I’m struggling with things like scrolling panels that scroll both with mouse and gamepad/keyboard controls and even the advanced section of unity.learn only covers “too simple for the real world”-ui.
Bonus question: Do actual commercial games use Unity UI or is there some kind of third party asset that’s state of the art?
I do ui based software as my dayjob so i’m really surprised that UI is the most frustrating part of gamedev for me until now. It’s not “making it work on old versions of internet explorer”-bad, but closer to it than anything else i did in the last 15 years.
Have a good sleep or a nice day and a good new year.
It could be frustrating getting familiar with the UI system, but once you get to know it you can really bend it to your will, you can always create your own UI components(for example a slider with arbitrary notches) fairly easily.
Check out UI Extensions, they have very handy stuff and some videos on youtube explaining how they work, it could give you a better understanding on how to handle different stuff.
if there anything specific you have a hard time implementing?
There’re 2 separated problem with uGUI. I think your is the first one, in which case you can look at UIToolkit.
So the first is that it is different from traditional XML+code based UI. This take a whole lot of getting used to, and the lack of documentation does not help. The only tip I have here is the source code of the UI system is partly open, a lot of things become clearer one you looked at that. It a shame that some of the vital components like RectTransform and Canvas are in the closed source native side. This first problem might be solved by UIToolkit.
The second problem is making a good UI system is just a lot of work. There a lot of things that we just don’t think about have to be implemented. Keyboard interaction like you said is one, other include text rendering, manage batching, vector rendering. I’m firmly believe these problem will not fully go away in UIToolkit.
Comercial games do use uGUI, since most game don’t requires very complex UI. If you’re not making something that is mostly UI, I think you can ignore many minor problems. Most game I played don’t have very good UI, but I never cared too much as it not I’m spending most of the time with.
AAA studio used to use Scaleform a lot, but that is getting deprecated as Flash die. The new big player seem to be Coherent Gameface
