Week 4 Blog Post #3

For this week’s class we learned the new UI system unity, which is easy to use as it is more visual than the old system in which you would have to hardcode almost everything in script. We are supposed to apply the new UI system into our game and listed below are the specifics  –

1. The game should have a main menu with a play button. It can have game artwork and any other elements you wish to add. The play button should start the game. One the play button is clicked. The menu should disappear.

2. The menu should also have a input field where the player enters his/her name. Once the player presses play/ hits enter on the keyboard, the menu should disappear and the name should appear on the status bar or the HUD within the game.3. Create an infinite scrolling background for the game.4. The HUD should also contain score/ distance travelled  

Firstly I started off with the infinite scrolling background which were two quads made to look like backgrounds and then we moved them along the X axis by going towards the –x coordinates and would reset its position to the starting position so it would look as the background is scrolling infinitely. While doing this I found a bug in unity that it does not autocomplete keywords used in unity, which confused me initially, but I reported it via the unity bug reporter and restarted unity which has temporarily stopped the problem .

Video of the infinite background: -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFycTOxVM0A

Secondly I added the UI elements such as score, distance and the players name .in order to take the players name I made a script called game manager where I would update the text based on the user's input but you would also need to add a name field where the player can type input and pass the input to the script in my case I had added the script to the Main camera and passed the camera onto the text input on the canvas.

Note- in order to use anything related to the new UI system you need to have Using unityengine.UI  learn more at (Unity , 2015)

 

Thirdly, I got the score working same way as the name but I didn’t have to use the game manager as I am currently using the player's distance travelled as score for now later I shall multiply distance * coins collected. Though I had problems with the play button, when I hit the play button the panel is not disabling which was working before. Update :- had to make changes in the inspector in order to fix the problem .

 Lastly i faced some minor problems while making this project which i would address by I will ask my lecturer about this problem during the next class.

 References

Unity. (2015, July 24). Unity - Using the UI Tools. Retrieved from https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/live-training-archive/using-the-ui-tools