Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Horizontal and Vertical layout groups
To control the layout of controls, you can define a set of controls to draw
in a particular direction, either horizontally or vertically. You start these in
the same way as areas by setting a
GUILayout.BeginHorizontal()
and
GUILayout.EndHorizontal()
command. Like the Area, you can specify
additional content for the new sub-area such as text or textures.
The Asset Store
Several packages on the Unity asset store have tried to build a more fluent UI creation
system. They have met with varying success and all suffer from one underlying issue,
they weren't built by Unity and don't have access to some of the underlying runtime
and rendering components of the Unity editor and player. This results in some
performance issues (but in some cases they are actually faster than the legacy GUI,
especially on mobile platforms) and (in some cases) hacky workarounds. All in all,
most have done incredibly well without access to Unity's innards.
With the release of the new Unity UI system however, I would recommend checking
the state of many of the
GUI
assets out there as several (quite understandably) have
bowed their heads and are dropping off the store. The main package is still ongoing
tag to it. With it though are a multitude of supporting assets to make its adoption
easier and offer integration into several other assets.
Enter Thunderdome
Now that you've seen what Unity has had available for so long with the legacy GUI
(and if you have experienced it you will undoubtedly shudder at this point), it is a
very welcome relief that the UI system has received such an overhaul in Unity 4.6.
It has been a long time coming and very much anticipated!
Note that this section is just a preliminary overview so you know
what's coming. Each section will be described in depth in the
following chapters.
Recognizing the need for change, Unity set upon the path of redesigning the GUI
system from the ground up. They have looked at what games have needed, what the
community has built (even with the limitations and restrictions of not having access
to Unity's core) and then sprinkled some fairy dust and hey presto, the new
Unity UI
system was born.
