This week's update is beginning to show the fruits of the new Unity UI release; I have been able to take a first pass at the new Main Menu for the game and the Party / Character creation menus.
These items haven't been coded in yet to do what they need to do
Changelist:
- Created new "Main Menu" scene
- Created new "Create Character" scene
- created enum in BaseCharacter class for CharacterRace
- added first six races to the character race enum
- created first pass main menu using new uGUI
- created script for main menu for each of the buttons to take you to the appropriate scenes (note only implemented the ones that exist so far)
- created first pass layout for the Character Class selection using uGUI
- created first pass layout for Character Race selection using uGUI
- created first pass layout for Party Creation using uGUI
- created first pass layout for Character Naming and Portrait selection using uGUI
- created first pass layout for Character Summary and confirmation using uGUI
- fixed a player movement bug that was created from the refactoring of the player movement in to its new PlayerMovement class
In the screenshot below we have the race selection screen, where you can see by the placeholder text once the player selects the potential race they will receive more information about that selection before deciding.
Next up we have the class selection screen, similar to race selection previewing a class by selecting it will eventually give you more information about that class.
At this time I've put in four 'core' RPG classes but I definitely will be adding more classes; I might utilize classes to put in the game as a kickstarter or indiegogo campaign - but that will be a little ways out before I decide how to approach that.
Next up we have a screen to name and configure your character portrait. The portrait area is using the new scrollable rectangle element in the Unity 4.6 GUI and works really nicely.
And finally we have what will be the final character creation screen where you review your character abilities and skills(and potentially assign out extra points) before finishing and saving the character:
So obviously these are using placeholder graphics but they still look fairly nice for what they are. By putting in some of the game set pieces in the background it actually presents as a fairly solid looking UI. I can definitely see people being able to use the Unity UI to pretty good effect without too extensive of effort needed.
I did encounter some difficulties with the UI though. There were times when it does not scale properly, or it will flip the graphics (showing as a red X). Its not clear to me yet if this is a bug or if I'm just doing something wrong when it happens. Typically when scaling it too much in just one directoin is when it happens, but there are occaisons that it would happen when just changing to a different aspect ratio or screen resolution.
For the most part I was able to design around that -- which leads me to believe that perhaps the issue is just a learning curve rather than a bug?
I did however have one thing occur I feel that really must be a bug which is while in the unity editor you often have a small window for a game preview which is supposed to look as much like the actually game will look when you press 'play' as possible. There are always a few things that don't always render though like particles won't play unless they are selected and lighting and shadow effects largely don't show in the preview window either.
So what happens is say you selected 1024x768 as the target size , but because of your window layout the window is actually scaled down to something like 512x the UI will not scale properly until you either undock the gameplay preview window or put it in its own tab so that the preview can match the desired target size.
Once I realized what was happening I was able to work around it easily enough - but until I figured it out I was having quite the hard time figuring out what was going on!
That's it for this week, thanks for reading!
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