Stop mouse click passing through buttons

Questions & Answers
1

I know this has been asked before but no clear resolution has been found.

I have a gui button and when I click on it, another script processes the fact that I clicked on the world behind the button.
I need to ignore mouse clicks in that other script if the mouse is clicking on the button.

Does anyone know a good way to do this?

This has been raised here:

but so far the only solution seems to be hacks involving setting a variable to true when a button is clicked and clearing it every frame and then testing that variable before processing any other mouse input.

The problem I seem to have with that is that other objects are Updated before the OnGui() is called (strange because those threads claim that doesn’t happen.)

If I put a Debug.Log() in the OnGui() and the Update() (and I’ve tried LateUpdate() as well), the log prints:

Update
OnGui

So the update processes the mouse click before the OnGui can determine that its over a button.

2

The best way to avoid this problem is to check if the mouse pointer is inside any “forbidden” rectangle before processing the mouse click:

function OverGui(): boolean { // return true if in forbidden region
    var mouse = Input.mousePosition;
    return gRect1.Contains(mouse) || gRect2.Contains(mouse) ||
           gRect3.Contains(mouse) || gRect3.Contains(mouse);
}

function Update(){ 
    if (!OverGui() && Input.GetMouseButtonDown(0)){
        // click was not over gui: do what you want
    }
}

The “forbidden” rectangles can be the same used in your GUI code to define the buttons - just define them as variables, like this:

var gRect1 = Rect(10,10,200,60);
var gRect2 = Rect(240,10,200,60);
var gRect3 = Rect(10,130,200,60);
var gRect4 = Rect(240,130,200,60);

function OnGUI(){
    if (GUI.Button(gRect1,"Button1")) ...
    if (GUI.Button(gRect2,"Button2")) ...

If functions in other scripts need to do the GUI test, declare the function and the rects as static, so you can easily access it from everywhere.