📲┃ui-ux

[chrome kettle]

Helps also to go into 2D mode after focusing it with F

But with Screen space - Overlay canvas specifically
If it's a Screen space - Camera canvas then you can instead select the camera and GameObject>Align View to Selected or same with alt + shift + F

[delicate mauve]

ok so i'm in 2d mode with the canvas in question

whare are my next steps?

[steep warren]

were already given...?

regarding the issue #📲┃ui-ux message
regarding the tooling #📲┃ui-ux message

[delicate mauve]

wait isn't it anchored to the bottom left?

[delicate mauve]

I have it now centered

but it still moves

when the width of the screen changes

and i don't know how to augment that

[prime panther]

I’m currently developing a mobile puzzle game in Unity and I’m searching for illustrators/artists for game assets and UI.

There are some good illustrators, but most of them haven’t worked on actual game assets before. Do you think this is still fine if I provide detailed prototypes/references, or should I specifically look for artists with mobile game asset experience?

Also, what are the most important things I should ask them before hiring?

[chrome kettle]

Afaik anchors are inherited all the way down from Canvas along with the rect transforms

[chrome kettle]

These channels are for development only

[jaunty tiger]

Any suggestions on getting better font outlines? Or more acurratly - more in line with figma outlines? the way unity has us do it with fiddling with the padding + dilating the face + the outline eating inwards is pretty bad imo - like in figma you just do '3point(pixel) outline stroke' boom done

[steep warren]

yeah. it needs to be anchored to the top and stretched horizontally. i think ive said this 3 times now

[steep warren]

they aren't really inherited, no? they're relative to the parent's rect

[chrome kettle]

In the sense that the parent's rect is scaled by its anchor points, and so on up the chain?

[steep warren]

ah, fair

i would say that the effects of the anchor scaling get inherited/propagate rather than the anchors themselves though

[chrome kettle]

Good clarification

[tribal turtle]

Does anyone know how to make a UI canvas have a slight curve while still being interactable? I've only been able to find stuff which is for creating curved UI on VR interfaces.

[jaunty tiger]

What do you mean slight curve? like so the edges are rounded or curve so it looks like a hud

[tribal turtle]

The curve so it looks like a hud. I'd like the whole canvas to bend rather than just each assets being drawn to look curved so it can be adjusted to player preference.

[jaunty tiger]

it might be a pain, but you could set the canvas to world space and add a cylinder to the canvas

I found swapping canvas to world space was more of a net negative than a positive - but from some cursory reading it doesn't seem easy to curve the canvas outside of using art assets directly in the overlay

[hollow sleet]

i dont know the specifics but you can do a different route to the same result by outputting to a render texture and getting that applied to a mesh as well

incase you want to avoid having to have a world space canvas for whatever reasons

[tribal turtle]

Hmm actually this worked pretty well, thanks!

[jaunty tiger]

I made a shader to solve this pog

[delicate mauve]

when you have a canvas

where is it supposed to be located in space?

like relative to the stuff you're putting on it?

i have a canvas in 2d vs 3d

and in 3d there's a bunch of behavior that's weird

because i think the canvas origin is weird

[chrome kettle]

What do you mean by this? "In 2d vs 3d" doesn't really make sense on the face of it
What type of canvases are you using; screen space - overlay, screen space - camera or world space?

[delicate mauve]

i'm not sure honestly

[steep warren]

there's a dropdown on the canvas component that will show which mode is selected

[delicate mauve]

The VR canvas is a world space canvas @chrome kettle @steep warren

The 2d canvas is a Screen space overlay

Sorry for multiple ping but Chris as you suggested I changed the dropdown to be anchored to the top and stretched horizontally but it still behaves weirdly when the width is changed or height is cahnged

[delicate mauve]

is this the origin of the object?

[chrome kettle]

With how cropped it is that could be anything
Move gizmo is located at the origin only if it's in Pivot mode
I think the Rect transform tool always shows the pivot, and other useful things specifically with UI objects

[delicate mauve]

These settings are as such

[chrome kettle]

"Center" is not "Pivot", and you still want to use the rect transform tool
If these are not familiar, you need to follow tutorials for the editor basics so you know how you should be navigating the scene and manipulating gameobjects

[delicate mauve]

i guess

i'm trying to google my way through a changeset

the UI part of unity i'm really bad at

[chrome kettle]

A changeset?

There must be some official tutorials at

!learn

[marble pawn]

:teacher: Unity Learn ↗

Over 750 hours of free live and on-demand learning content for all levels of experience!

[delicate mauve]

the list of things i've been assigned to fix

[steep warren]

elaborate on "weirdly". if you want it to stretch fully you'll need to set left/right to 0, if you only want it to be, say, 50% of the parent width (but centered) the anchors need to be at 0.25 and 0.75 (and left/right 0)

[delicate mauve]

the vertical position changes when the width changes

when it gets smaller, it goes up

[steep warren]

sounds like canvas scaling, and perhaps the parents aren't anchored correctly.

[chrome kettle]

The proper solution seems to learn how anchors and scaling are inherited
Visual examples in the docs: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.ugui@2.5/manual/UIBasicLayout.html
And consider that canvas scaler affects anchor scaling too

[delicate mauve]

how might i address the scaling?

[delicate mauve]

if there's a discrepency between where the interactable area for a thing is

vs where it renders

why might hat be?

[lost relic]

Unity 6.4 and still in 6.6... working as intended xD URP issues i guess, but i've looked about something without good results yet

If i turn gizmos off i can't select anything at all in Scene window

the inspector doesn't open up on the object

It seems like LOD system is now baked in and can't be turned off even for simple 2D UI game, some posts hint that may be the reason although nobody knows for sure

I had Depth priming mode Auto (in Universal Render Data)

[jaunty tiger]

can you show what your canvas setting are in inspector

and are you swapping between different sized monitors and thats whats fricking up?

or is this just occuring on your default sized monitor

[delicate mauve]

Default

[jaunty tiger]

link inspector of canvas, and of ui element

sounds similar to issues I had a while back so could be same reason, easy to tell from looking at that - but tldr is you might have the canvas anchor in a non full screen space or canvas might not be set right - like typically what you want to do is.. something like this

gime a second - booting up unity

so big thing is I have a lot of my things nested in a empty that makes ulltrawide and super ultrawide work - but if you are doing something like that or have any ui element that isn't nested in something thats stretching to screen size, it'll behave wonky when you hit play and wont show in scene view

but then inside that im anchoring to sides of screen specifically - instead of a space with EVERY single container, stuff inside those containers its ok to anchor in dif spots as long as you understand that might make it wierd on different monitor sizes

so in this screenshoit your specifically looking at patient dropdown but what is content, session review window and windows in terms of how they are anchoreed

the parent object is the one that has final say

[jaunty tiger]

are you using a layout group for this? could explain the shift

[delicate mauve]

One seccc

[leaden crown]

I was wondering for advice to make this look better
Is this a channel for aesthetics at all or just actual functionality?

If so
All that is essential here is a grid for selectable abilities
a row for equipping abilities (like a hotbar)
And a visual of the planet with details about it

For context:
The position of the planet is adjustable via cinemachine camera
i have this zoom effect when selecting a location

[delicate mauve]

i'm restarting the whole layout

are prefabs useful for menu layouts?

like if you have a menu in vr vs 2d

[steep warren]

yeah

[delicate mauve]

ok

Ok so i'm seeing a weird thing

The container has a VerticalLayoutGroup

And the patient dropdown is anchored to the top center

why is this floating in the middle?

[steep warren]

what's the container's bounding box?

and what are the vertical layout group settings

[delicate mauve]

what's the bounding box?

soemthing that is interesting is that the anchoring of the dropdown keeps resetting

keeps resetting to this

even after

i set this

when i save, it goes back

[steep warren]

child alignment middle center

[steep warren]

it's being controlled by the vertical layout group, as it says

[delicate mauve]

wdym?

ok i see

just setting that back to upper left fixed taht

a small thing

What is this little line in the middle of the control?

in the scene view

[steep warren]

not sure, i don't recognize it. probably a gizmo for something

[tame shell]

Inside a layout group anchors do nothing

If I understand the current layout which I hardly do

Inside a layout group make use of flexible size if you want items to use up empty space

Preferred size + flexible size should get you there.
Layout element component.is your friend
@delicate mauve ⬆️

[delicate mauve]

flexible size?

[tame shell]

It's like flex grow, flexible size on elements allows them to fill remaining space in a layout group

https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.ugui@1.0/manual/script-LayoutElement.html

[delicate mauve]

gotcha ok

ok now i'm adding another element

and it renders ontop of the first one. hmm

[tame shell]

What does that mean? It's overlapping? Miss use of content size fitter perhaps?

Ugui is not like flex in web/UITK, you have to have layout groups on things you want to "pass up" layout info

[delicate mauve]

This is the layout so far

the bottom one renders ontop of the first

how doi specfiy margins?

[tame shell]

So Container holds these both?

[delicate mauve]

in between layout elements?

[tame shell]

You mean spacing?

[delicate mauve]

yes

yeah

[tame shell]

I'm going to presume the drop-down currently has height of 0 and it's children have bad anchors fooling you

[delicate mauve]

the spacing property on the vertical layout doesn't seem to work here as i intend

[delicate mauve]

yes dropdown height of 0

unclear on the children

[tame shell]

Add a layout element to it, set it's preferred height and THEN fix the children anchors so it can ALL resize properly

[delicate mauve]

to the dropdown?

[tame shell]

Yes

[delicate mauve]

ok one secc

[tame shell]

As you change it's height via layout element you will observe how incorrect setting of anchors means the children fail to resize with their parent (which is dropdown)

Basically you looked at the visual result only and failed to analyse the layout properly

[delicate mauve]

umm i'm changing preferred height and it's not changing

in the UI

[tame shell]

Is container tall enough? Does it have control child height enabled?

[delicate mauve]

based on the scene view def tall enough

no controlling height enabled on verticallayout

[tame shell]

Do not change scale it's a bad idea

Layouts don't use scale by default

[delicate mauve]

it changed automatically

[tame shell]

Change it back unity does that sometimes

[delicate mauve]

1,1,1 ya?

ok that leaves me with that ( i removed the other element for now)

i gotta fix the padding one sec

[tame shell]

For good layout here you want:
Container (vertical layout with control height on, force expand height off):
-- drop-down (preferred height, flexible height 0)
-- list (flexible height 1)

[delicate mauve]

one sec

why did the right padding not take effect here?

[steep warren]

set alignment to upper middle and let it control child width, probably

[tame shell]

Control size is off for everything... You want height control on and width control on.
Force width is probably desired here too

[delicate mauve]

hold upp

[tame shell]

Layout group will CONTROL it's childrens size if that's on

Making it do the cool layout things

[delicate mauve]

ok one sec i'm ack

back

All i've done is add a textfield

and manually set the width for the thing

ok now i think i'm going to add back in the other one

oh one thign

how do i add an element to a prefab that wasn't previously there?

nvm i got it

alright now to do the main part which is the adding in of the other window

so the widnow when i drop it in looks like this. its everything under list

i'm going to remove the session review object from the list and make it a sibling of patientdropdown, and remove the list because i don't see the point of it

now i see this

[tame shell]

What is list? A scroll rect?

I don't even know what you really want to do tbh

[delicate mauve]

session review is a parent containing an object containing the scrollrect

i want to make this view, the session review view

to be in line with the dropdown

why does the session review object

overlap with the others?

[tame shell]

ANCHORS

Unless anchors are set OR the direct parent has a layout group to control it's size it won't resize

[delicate mauve]

which direct parent in this case?

container?

or session review?

another thing, related

in the scene view, if i select the parent session review

then it won't show the bounds

but in the immediate child object, if i select it, it will

i see so force expand on the vert layout is when you wanna evenly space out everything along one axis

for some reason going force expand width fixes the one thing

[delicate mauve]

i think i got the majority of the issues resolved

[tame shell]

This setting ignores what child elements want and makes them all take up equal space.
Flexible/preferred size is the alternative and flexible size can do what force expand does too.

[delicate mauve]

ahh ok

i have another ui question

i have this layout where SettingContent has a scrollrect, and List is a container for all the setting controls

But the scroll bar cuts off before the end of the list

[delicate mauve]

nvm i got it

[mellow granite]

How do i make my text mesh pro a plain white not emmiting?

[jaunty tiger]

change the color to like 240, 240, 240

will help quite a lot, you can turn lighting on as well but i suggest not doing that

[wind flicker]

any hints why the buttons there are not visible? they'r clickable but not visible. they'r prefabs while the prefab itself is fine

they get loaded in

[steep warren]

for UI stuff, use the rect transform tool so you can see the rect transform bounds

perhaps show the inspector for that button

[wind flicker]

does this help? also it looks like its there just invisible

[steep warren]

you don't seem to have set a sprite for the button

[wind flicker]

it has a background also it looks good as the prefab itself

i might found the issue

[hollow heron]

I have 2 lines and 2 buttons in a horizontal layout group

How can I get the white lines to fill the empty space to the edges?

[steep warren]

seems like you would want to have them have flex widths with a sliced sprite/image, but i'm not sure where you would put the flex width. i would say just as layout elements on the lines but i'm not sure if that's valid as a child of another layout group

[hollow heron]

Just managed to get it with LayoutElement: Flex width on the lines, and LayoutElement: Preferred width 680 on the buttons.. even though the buttons width is only 100 🤷‍♂️
Edit: **MinWidth **works properly

[wind flicker]

my problem is that whenever i put something in the availableitemsContent its not displaying in the game, when i drag it out of it its showing just fine, what should i check to have it working?

[wind flicker]

ok got it fixed i just made a new scrollview

[jaunty tiger]

Would using SDF-16 with padding 30 add a lot of load to the game or something as compared to SDF-AA? for font importing?

[golden stump]

Hi I need a panel with a scroll view to expand vertically until it runs out of space and then just allow the scrollview to handle additional scrollable space. But I think there is no easy way to do this without adding code to size the base panel based on number of children and then apply a hard limit.

[steep warren]

add a layout element to the scrollview to have its height flex?

wait no

if you want it to fill the vertical space, just anchor it to stretch in its container?

[golden stump]

I will anchor scrollview to stretch in containing panel but I think I have to manually decide on containing panel's height because I want it to grow in size and hit a maximum depending on screen height. This stuff is too tricky in ugui! contstraints within constraints are too much of a headache

[steep warren]

you want it to grow in size to just fill the screen height or according to elements inside?

if you want it to just fill the screen height, just anchor it properly.

[golden stump]

no both - that is what makes it tricky. Of course anchor to screen height is easy

[steep warren]

you aren't clearly stating what you're trying to do

[golden stump]

I need a panel to expand vertically to contain all contents until it hits a max height - then the scroll view will come into play

[tame shell]

Scroll view is shit and doesn't do this automatically so you have to do it yourself with code

I've done it many times. Grab the preferred height of content and set the scroll rect height (clamped into a range)

No idea if uitk is better for this

[wind flicker]

what do people usually use nowadays to make UI's? like if they wanna implement buttons from files made outside of unity

main menu n stuff

[tame shell]

both ugui and uitk can do this with ease

9 slice sprites make this easy

[wind flicker]

can it create buttons like this?

[proud sandal]

people use whatever workflow they prefer, web-people gravitate to UIToolkit, traditional design people gravitate to CanvasUI

[wind flicker]

i come from a time where we did design everything in another software and then imported the single things

[tame shell]

Yes. https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.4/Documentation/Manual/sprite/9-slice/9-slicing.html

UITK can do borders on elements but not much else yet

so just do whatever you want rn

[wind flicker]

so its better to create stuff outside of unity

and then import the sprites

[tame shell]

usually yes

[wind flicker]

what software do we use for this?

[proud sandal]

that is one workflow

[tame shell]

image makey ones (see google)

[wind flicker]

many years ago i used to use photoshop

[proud sandal]

this is by no means the only correct workflow

the "modern" approach is to make UI resolution independent and use sprites only when absolutely necessary/demanded by the style.

9-sliced sprites are a compromise between those worlds

[tame shell]

well till more cool web features exist in uitk without having to pay others then its the best option for greater artistic control

UGUI has shadow/outline but they are badly implemented

[proud sandal]

the powerful way today to use UGUI is to make custom shaders to draw this kind of button

although you can just make a sprite that looks like this

in UITK you will be writing a few 100 lines of CSS to get that look in a usable fashion

[tame shell]

I use some procedural image thing from the asset store for UGUI which makes outlines with softness easy
Often use this to do ui design similar to that

[proud sandal]

yes, that works too, but ultimately those are also just shaders

[tame shell]

They are, purpose made to fill these roles and already working 🙂

[wind flicker]

hmm i never rly tried UGUI tbh

[proud sandal]

i meant to say, the styling of UGUI is now easily accessible via ShaderGraph, which is a change from years past.

[wind flicker]

so its not recommended to make the graphics outside?

[proud sandal]

whatever makes you productive is recommended

[tame shell]

Over the 4/5 years I did mobile game UI ALL our ui buttons were 9 slice

Lots of mobile game UI kinda needs it

[proud sandal]

you can go far with it

[wind flicker]

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/gui/heat-complete-modern-ui-264857 like how do people create stuff like that?

thats not in editor made

is it?

[proud sandal]

thats uGUI + sprites

barely any sprites though

if you look closely, the "style" is mostly in the backround images, colors, icons and fonts

[tame shell]

Maybe a 9 slice for the border and a masked fill image in the middle

[wind flicker]

hmmm.. i wanna do cool UI for my game but im a little bit overwhelmed by how at these times, gameplay wise im super far now

[proud sandal]

if you like that Heat style as an example, that can be done almost entirely in-editor

i would say its most valuable texture is just a 1 pixel frame sprite, 9-sliced.

something like this

[wind flicker]

a friend generated me this in ai, i rly like how these look i would like to recreate it, just this with an background image of the game would do. the yellow one with an mouse-hover but not sure whats the best way to approach so

[proud sandal]

you can do this with 9-slicing too

[tame shell]

easy mode: remove text and all buttons are this size in this context
medium mode: remove text and make it it tileable in the middle for 9 slice

[wind flicker]

but remove text like how? its an picture, im so confused rn :D

[proud sandal]

photoshop

[tame shell]

Ask the AI to try again

or use skill

Ill be real, if you can ask the AI to gen something surely you can ask it to remove stuff you dont want?

Otherwise a human fixes it/makes something

[wind flicker]

hmm yeah i guess ill just recreate it as a single button without text

[chrome kettle]

If the original question was if you can compose the UI itself outside of Unity, I don't think you can or I'm not aware of any such tool

[wind flicker]

no the question was whats the modern tool nowadays to create game art like menu design

because earlier in the days i did everything with photoshop and then exported it and made it a sprite and chosed it as the button

[tame shell]

On web you dont need to because css can do soo much

uitk is yet to get there but we have some bits there

[wind flicker]

im doing a standalone game, not a web version

this is my main menu rn

[tame shell]

unity web export is not what i meant

[limpid raven]

why not just ask AI again to remove the text?

[wind flicker]

i mean yeah could do but its not super high quality

[tame shell]

https://kenney.nl/assets/ui-pack-adventure

[wind flicker]

oh this could work by recoloring, im downloading dragon crashers ui toolkit sample now to see what this can do

[jaunty tiger]

we use Figma, if you know how vectors work you can just make whatever you want in there

depends on your game though, like if pixel art you could do it all in aseprite pretty easily, photoshop good too

[wind flicker]

not pixelart no

i got pyxel edit, idk why but i was in "pyxel edit or asperite" and i chosed pyxel edit over asperite, idk why

[delicate mauve]

i have another layout question

this is the layout in sceneview

how should i fix this?

[tame shell]

What's wrong with this?

[delicate mauve]

See how it overlaps?

@tame shell

[tame shell]

Is the text and scroll bar in a horizontal layout group?

[delicate mauve]

everything in the box is currently in 1 giant hori layout group

the tip, hte "neuro...", "easier", textbox, etc

[tame shell]

I would have the 3 pieces of text use preferred width (auto from tmp text) and the scroll bar to use flexible layout width

[delicate mauve]

the "harder" label is the problematic one

the others seem ok

i mean relative to "easier" and "neurofeedback"

[tame shell]

If the text is inside another gameobject then that won't provide the texts width anymore

And use of layout element overrides what tmp text provides

[tame shell]

Well there ya go

[delicate mauve]

it still overlaps

[tame shell]

Ah then the scroll bar is badly done

E.g. inside another gameobject with fucky anchors

Click the things and stare at the gizmos and it should be clear...

[delicate mauve]

i'm a litle confused by it since it has multiple parts to it (i didn't write this code it came to me)

[tame shell]

You can see the parent of the scroll bar is sized properly and the inner shit is bad

[delicate mauve]

yeah

well

ok so even the parent

one sec

[tame shell]

Well only the thing holding that got it's size set, what's inside is gonna do whatever so anchors or another layout grouo

[delicate mauve]

this is the top level object that ocntains everythign

and itself its smaller then the stuff inside

ok i think my plan is make occupy the whole width first

make the parent occupy the whole width

lowkey i don't get why everything is in a horizontal layout group

[tame shell]

I'll be real is hard to follow this but please look at the gizmos showing the object sizes and dig down to see why visuals don't do as you want

[delicate mauve]

ok

[tame shell]

You can always test with a simple image and layout element and check flexible size/preferred size

@delicate mauve Lil demo of how I may set up something like this

[delicate mauve]

thank you for this!!!

in trying to modify the existing layout the part that's a bit confusing is how the entire contents of the box is in a horizontal layout

so that you have 2 rows

but everything is in a horizontal layout

[tame shell]

Note when i make a new empty container and move the scroll bar inside it
In there that container does not have a layout group so inside that I can change anchors cus its "do whatever" mode

only immediate children of a layout group get "controlled"

[golden stump]

A custom component allowed me to manage the scrollview size based on screen height as well as content. Generally UGUI is fine for me but applying sizing restrictions is poor. At least customizing UGUI is even easier now with AI giving pointers (but usually failing to do best code)!

[steep warren]

As you can see from the video, the results can go up and down way farther than it should.
they look pretty normal to me. i'm not sure what you're expecting?
the behaviour you described sounds like you want it to not scroll

[pine lake]

I would like the list to stop right here, so that it won't go any higher

This is behavior i want to avoid

[steep warren]

ah, gotcha.

your scroll rect seems to be set up kinda weird, there's usually more elements there. did you just add the Scroll Rect component?

[pine lake]

yes, there's where I thought the issue was as well

[steep warren]

try doing Create > UI > Scroll rect (something along those lines) and see how it's set up
i think the part that's important here would be a Content element that's dynamically sized, with i think a vertical layout group

[pine lake]

ooh, lemme play around

I'll be back

[pine lake]

Okay, so, few things

I changed my hierarchy by a fair bit, following the Create > UI > Scroll View steps

I also checked out this page that detailed how to configure a scroll rect https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.ugui@2.6/manual/script-ScrollRect.html

But as you can see in the video, the list is stuck in the starting position. (Same thing happens if there are more Result objects than visible in the viewport). I'm not entirely sure how to fix that without setting Movement Type to Unrestricted (which causes unintended behavior)

Here's each object's relevant components:
Scroll View:

• Scroll Rect
  Viewport:
• Image
• Mask
  Content:
• Vertical Layout Group

Oh i found the solution, turns out I was missing a Content Size Fitter inside my Content object. I set Vertical Fit as Preferred Size and now everything seems to be working fine

[austere heath]

hello, could someone help me? i’m trying to make a simple ui that so far only has a textmeshpro, but whenever i activate the gameobject of this ui in the game, especially the first time, the game freezes for a moment

[tame shell]

When it first becomes active it will generate the mesh for the text. If it needs to use many fallback fonts it can be slow (especially if it needs to populate dynamic font textures)

[austere heath]

but i only changed the text size, and set the font style to bold, nothing else

and it’s a very noticeable freeze

[tame shell]

If the text starts off as disabled then im 95% sure its the initial mesh gen + other bits

use the profiler to confirm the cause

[austere heath]

the parent object starts disabled

[tame shell]

Yea that then counts. Use the profiler to check what causes the lag spike

[austere heath]

this?

the white line was at the moment of the freeze

[tame shell]

Yea now check the timeline/hierachy to see what took ages to execute
You may want to go learn how to use the profiler if its your first time

[austere heath]

the last things

[tame shell]

Yea 50ms to render the canvas is bad but is probably due to lots of setup/mesh generation

[austere heath]

and what can i do to fix it?

[tame shell]

can you share what this ui that you enable looks like?

[austere heath]

it’s literally just the text itself

[tame shell]

oh shit thats very bad 😆
you need to show the rests of whats under CanvasUpdate.PreRender

Hierachy mode is easier to read

I mean "Hierarchy view" here
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/profiler-cpu-introduction.html

[tame shell]

You cant do much about mono jit, this may be gone in a build
layout does seem to be high for just some text...

[austere heath]

all my canvas:

the buttons have an image

[tame shell]

yea this is very simple so either something is bugged, you have miss used some layout components like content size fitter or your computer is slow

[austere heath]

there’s a content size fitter on the text

it’s a bit slow, but not that much, i’ve had other small projects with way more texts being activated/deactivated that didn’t have this problem

i’m gonna try recreating my project the way i made the others, normally i created the 3d build-in render project and then implemented URP, but in this one i created it directly with the URP option

[tame shell]

The important thing to learn is that you do NOT need or want to use content size fitters within a layout group
usually unity warns you about this though on the component as its soo common

[austere heath]

it’s not inside a layout group

[tame shell]

yea no idea then. you can try remaking this to test what happens but i cant see how such simple ui is doing this

[austere heath]

i just recreated my project and it didn’t work, the freezing still happens

[jaunty tiger]

are there any scripts attached to the canvas, crosshair, interactionUI or objectname?

[celest garden]

Hi! Im making a stylized pixel game.

Im currently using textmeshpro (bitmap) for text, and id like to add outline and 3D effect like this to the font, would that be possible? Or do i need to make my own shader or? Id really want to make it pixel perfect, but from my experience, it seems like im better off making custom solution if i wanted pre-made characters

[tame shell]

The TMP outline effect uses SDF (sdf is not good for bitmap fonts) so for a bitmap font you would need to do it in shader via edge detection
easy option is to just have two versions and swap between

[celest garden]

Doesnt work for me.
I think ill end up making a custom solution
Before i used legacy text (3 of them) + custom outline script which.. might have not be the greatest idea

id like to be able to pre-paint the characters and import them as sprites i think
this way id be able to use sprite editor to offset them and etc

TextMeshPro just doesnt work for me imo
In all of my projects, in span of 5 years i always had to put up with tmpro just acting up
I still dont get who trought its gonna be a great idea to merge it with UGUI

There is just too much unnecessary stuff in it and etc
All i need is text i can display...

[tame shell]

legacy text and tmp both are made to use fonts. TMP is just better in every way. The UGUI outline component actually just renders the mesh extra times with offsets so its pretty shit.
You can do your own version but you should be able to generate your own font and use tmp with a bitmap shader (included with TMP)

[celest garden]

I saw a tutorial saying i should paint my own atlas and then use a website or a tool to generate a font file from
but i see this as pointles..

like, i tmpro is just too bloated with unnecesary files and with features that dont even work with my text or cause issues when i do use them
i feel like making my own would just make everything easier

[tame shell]

Goodluck doing all the complex layout logic for the text from scratch 😐

If you make a font then you can use UITK or TMP with ease
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.textmeshpro@4.0/manual/ShadersBitmap.html

Use a free font like this to test how it handles bitmap fonts
https://kenney.nl/assets/kenney-fonts

[celest garden]

i already have a project with bitmap fonts

i already use tmpro

its the effects i need that cause me trouble

[tame shell]

As i said, outline just doesn't work without SDF being the generation mode and thats a poor fit for bitmap styled fonts

so custom shader to draw the font yes, custom logic to generate the text mesh? no.

[celest garden]

i still want to edit the font texture tho
and editing the generated one just doent feel right

the other way i can do the effect is to have 3 copies of the text everywhere which isnt the greatest idea

This has been done in NGUI with having 3 texts layered

The way i wanted to do it is to have a custom texture with 3 colors, and then just swap them trough shader

Recreating this in TMPro was pain and i wasnt able to nail the effect

[tame shell]

well its up to you what you do goodluck

[celest garden]

Thanks

[celest garden]

I got an idea.
Now that i mapped out the font right here. (see img)

Its in a 32x32 grid
Meaning, i can now make a custom parser that will create me a font asset from this image.
Alongside it i can include a config file for offsetting characters and other properties. (Ill use Toml cuz i already use it for localization)

After that i should be able to create a TMPro asset from it
If not, ill use the classic legacy text, because i wont need any effects anyway

[tame shell]

Use tmp as that still uses normal font assets so there is no downside

[celest garden]

Yeah that was my plan

[celest garden]

I got the thing working
Now i can just make atlases manualy without using some janky font generators and etc
The only issue is that the atlases arent compact anymore since they are human made.

But this can be technically fixed by generating one manualy or just lowering the space between characters

[austere heath]

Nop

[jaunty tiger]

And this freeze is happening as you load the text? whats occuring in your game manager / stuff that happens on load?

[jaunty tiger]

Like how i'd test this is make a new scene with NOTHING but the text attached and see if its there, if its there somethings occuring when you like are loading text in general / in your game manager on awake

[austere heath]

So, it’s an interaction UI that shows the object’s name when the mouse hovers over it. Then I noticed this freeze when hovering over the first object during gameplay. To test it, I added a script so that pressing a key enables/disables this UI that contains the text. I also tried using only the text, and the first time it gets activated, it causes a freeze

[jaunty tiger]

What uhm

[austere heath]

i tested it and the freezing still happens

[jaunty tiger]

import settings did you use for font?

[austere heath]

i didn’t even touch that, just the default ones it came with

[jaunty tiger]

Oh your using a default unity font?

[austere heath]

yes

[jaunty tiger]

Can you show the inspector for the parent canvas, text, and interaction UI

[sterile fox]

Can someone tell me if trying to read UV1 from shadergraph canvas is somehow broken?
I have my channels properly setup, am using PositionToUV1, but it's still returning black for the UV1s.

[jaunty tiger]

does it lag with the constant size filter off

[austere heath]

i tested it and the freezing still happens

[jaunty tiger]

i looked at liberation, its SDFAA-Hinted which is pretty lightweight and shouldn't be causing this, honestly my only guess is like something happening in your game when it runs could be lagging it, that or something in your render pipeline might be messed up i guess? but your rendering on screen-space overlay

could check and see if your somehow rendering screen-space overlay with URP or something, the overlay is supposed to not be associated with the render pipeline

[austere heath]

how could i check that?

[jaunty tiger]

easiest way is to just make a new project, recreate steps and see if lags there - would mean that fresh no settings changed project is fine

are you using URP?

[austere heath]

yes

[jaunty tiger]

if you dont think you adjusted any settings of your renderer though you it most likely isn't that at all though, its a pain to go adjust them - but if you look up urp you can see the settings

[austere heath]

i created the project using the option that already comes with URP and i'm using the balanced preset, with a few minor changes (basically just the shadows)

[jaunty tiger]

yeah shouldnt effect it then

[austere heath]

i'm creating another project here to test then

[jaunty tiger]

im thinking, rereading problem - have you tried this in like a build as well? when you say your activating the game object in scene how exactly are you activating it

like you click on something and text appears?

if you don't prepackage fonts they can cause lag - ive never experienced it but when i was looking into like how to do english -> chinese translations that was a pretty big thing

if unity is having to generate the font it's bad i think

ill look at the alphabet i got for chinese characters when i get home see what settings i flicked on

[austere heath]

void update()
{
  if (Input.getkeydown(Keycode.U)
  {
    interactionUI.SetActive(true);
  }
}

[austere heath]

i'm using the default TextMeshPro font, so if something needs to be changed, i have no idea.

i also haven't tested it in a build.

[jaunty tiger]

Oh uhm

Try this script

void Update()
{
if (Input.GetKey(KeyCode.U) && !interactionUI.activeSelf)
interactionUI.SetActive(true);
}

Just a theory but your script might just be calling itself a lot since it doesn’t check if it’s active or not so when you press u if you hold down for a while might be stacking calls I doubt it but yolo

[austere heath]

it’s still freezing

[austere heath]

freezing...

[sinful bear]

Hi everyone, I would like to make a button when hoverd over with mouse/pointer, it glows. To do this, do i need a script? what would be the best method

I am using my own PNG

[flat sapphire]

Hi all, I'm struggling with the input system's split screen feature.
Every player has a base camera, with post processing enabled, along with an overlay camera (in the base camera's stack), without post processing, for UI and such (both are Screen Space - Camera). When split screen is enabled, the UI gets squished together, rather than scaling down properly. Having fiddled around with it, I've found a few ways for it to not get squished down, but it also doesn't scale properly, and most importantly, the buttons in the UI don't work as intended - it is like their "hit boxes" are still half size, or something similar.

My idea was to instead put each player UI in Screen Space - Overlay mode, and manually scale and crop a panel containing all of the elements with a script, but I am wondering if there is not a better way to handle this with the UI's scaling options.

[fossil shale]

I have buttons in a vertical layout group. Is there a way to override the height of one of these buttons to make it shorter? I thought preferred height in LayoutElement might do it, but it doesn't

[strange island]

When I import UI assets and theyre too big or too small, should I be adjusting their PPU to scale them correctly and then adjusting their applied-to components to adjust for the new size or is there something else I should be doing?

[chrome kettle]

You can adjust either PPU or component scale to get a specific size
But PPU is there so you can enforce a specific size relative to resolution, or resolution relative to size, and don't have to keep changing component scale to conform to different images

[strange island]

Thanks. I'm still early into the project and am using some placeholder UI assets anyhow I wanna completely swap out later (sounds like another fun adventure whenever that happens lol) so I will try out the PPU method and play around with this stuff as I learn. Thanks

[tame shell]

Preferred height on layout element will be used unless "force expand" is on and "control child size" is off

If control size is off then just change size on the rect transform

[celest garden]

Can anyone help?
I added TMPro input field but when i tested on my phone, the text field on soft keyboard did not appear
I have no idea whats wrong

[flat sapphire]

Is it possible to have several active UI elements using the input system, for example for using the input system's split screen system, with multiple menus?

[tame shell]

Android or ios? unity remote wont work to test this. You did not disable the keyboard showing so this should be working

[celest garden]

android build
tried switching from Game Activity to Activity but it didnt change anything

[tame shell]

Are you sure you were able to select the input field? Also was this a freshly made input field?

[celest garden]

I was able to type in the field
also yes, i just added TMP input field component to the prefab and manualy asigned text and viewport

[tame shell]

Ideally you try with one created via the gameobject creation menu
anyway this is not enabled for you so something else must be wrong
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.textmeshpro@4.0/api/TMPro.TMP_InputField.html#TMPro_TMP_InputField_shouldHideMobileInput

[celest garden]

wait a bit let me boot up and try, gotta wait for build tho

[celest garden]

actually, whats the chance that its because im using beta version of engine

[tame shell]

Always possible but ugui doesnt get new features anymore really

old or new input system?

[celest garden]

a bit out of the topic but
UGUI got a small update recently
pretty sure they are picking it up as said in Unite

[celest garden]

new

[tame shell]

well yea some ugui things change but nothing major i expect compared to uitk

id expect tmp to work fine in any recent version

[celest garden]

Creating it with the on from GameObject menu worked??????
Thanks!
Now the question is.. why?

[tame shell]

Probably some miss configuration when you tried to make it by hand

[celest garden]

the only difference i could see is the object structure and missing placeholder

[celest garden]

I just checked both mine and created one and appearently hide mobile input was enabled?????????????
I literally took the screenshot after brainstoriming the issue thats actually so dumb on my end.
Im actually pissed off how dumb i am.

Thank you for help!!!!

[scenic geode]

hello, i need help, i manage to take my spritesheet nd convert them into spritesheets sprites. how do i 9-Slice this?

thanks. (in case i dont respond, i fell asleep)

[mortal robin]

https://docs.unity3d.com/6000.4/Documentation/Manual/sprite/9-slice/set-sprite-9slicing.html

[scenic geode]

Hey, thank you again but this isnt available for my case. You see i used multiple meshtype. To separate my sprute sheet into individual mesh types.
Is it possible to 9slice those?

[mortal robin]

The process is exactly the same

"multiple" is not a mesh type, it's a sprite mode

[karmic oriole]

how a indiviual tmp text's shader can be set i cant find it

[supple wharf]

User interface best interface

[zinc moth]

Is this where we ask for dark theme in free version ? @faint torrent

[faint torrent]

🤔

[versed mauve]

[lyric goblet]

For dark theme in free version, get some mostly-transparent dark plastic, cut out your editor window layout, and tape to your monitor.

[blissful epoch]

Or just turn off the screen. Saves energy too.

For full immersive dark mode

[desert marsh]

get AMOLED monitor and bask in the fully dark black pixels

fully immersive advanced dark mode

[upbeat relic]

ohhhhhhhhh that sounds too good to be free, make it the paid feature and put the current dark theme in the free version

[faint torrent]

I actually know a guy who uses light editor theme on Unity Pro

like, who would do that willingly

[weary lynx]

Me

[faint torrent]

Even Unity expects everyone to use dark theme on paid because there used to be this bug that kept reverting the theme to dark one even if you changed it on Unity Pro 😄

[crimson relic]

that's not a bug its a feature

[autumn spire]

Is native emoji support on the roadmap for TMP?

[faint torrent]

I'd actually want direct SVG support (or does it support this?

having to convert svg's to font chars is tedious

basically supporting any kind of shapes would be trivial then (as long as you are fine with SDF tech limits)

[autumn spire]

are source fonts in SVG a common thing? I feel like I've never encountered that

[faint torrent]

oh, I'm not really talking about text but all kind of icons and symbols now

[autumn spire]

got it

[faint torrent]

like, you can use SDF tech for that just fine and TextMesh Pro relies on the same idea, would be nice to be able to utilize it directly for UI stuff

but as for TTF fonts, they are in vector form

so you can convert SVG paths to TTF fonts characters

for example fontforge (free) lets you do that

it's just extra step if you actually make UI art, you'd just want to import the SVG changes to Unity directly

Unity does have vector graphics plugin that lets you import SVG, but they actually convert the SVG into mesh there

so it's not really that useful for UI purposes

SDFs are

[upper wagon]

It's way expensive to render vectors as far as the tradeoff goes between SDF

Just while I'm shilling on the new server, to make a comparison, I'm working on a UGUI replacement library which I implemented MSDF for;

MSDF on top vs unity's native hinted on the bottom, if you view fullscreen you can really see the difference

With sdf you get corner rounding issues since it can only display sharp deltas as gradients, MSDF uses three channels to map it into separate shapes so you don't end up with soft corners

[autumn spire]

thats awesome

very noticible on S and G

[late remnant]

Hey folks! I have a mesh that I want to render in a canvas. The mesh is entirely planar, and I’d ideally like to to be maskable (or, even better, a rectangle mask.) Does anyone know of any example out there that does something like this?

[mighty elbow]

The unity UI extensions library has a polygon component

that might be a decent base point

just be really careful - vertex count limits in the UI system are fierce.

https://bitbucket.org/UnityUIExtensions/unity-ui-extensions <-- that one there. @late remnant

Look at the UIPolygon component in there.

[autumn spire]

setup a camera where you render the mesh, set the camera's target to a render texture, add a RawImage to the appropriate place in your UI hiearchy, set the raw image's texture to the render texture

will play nicely with everything

[late remnant]

Thanks! Do you roughly know what the vertex count limit is?

@autumn spire that’s a cool idea, but I imagine it’d be trickier to avoid filtering artefacts

If I can’t get the actual mesh into the canvas then I’ll try it

[autumn spire]

I think its a pretty common approach - and you can turn on things like AA on the render texture itself

[late remnant]

@mighty elbow @autumn spire thanks for the advice, both - I got it working fine!

[upper wagon]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Unity3D/comments/af7o14/fully_programmatic_retainedmode_ui_library_onetwo/

Apologies if we aren't supposed to advertise here, just wanted to link this early announcement for the UI library I'm building and see if I can get any thoughts/suggestions, wondering what UI devs think of the general workflow

[true basin]

TextMeshProUGUI.maxHeight;
TextMeshProUGUI.minHeight;
TextMeshProUGUI.preferredHeight;
TextMeshProUGUI.renderedHeight;
TextMeshProUGUI.flexibleHeight;

Which one is the height of the text ? Whats the difference ? WHY ARE THERE NO COMMENTS !?!?!?!?

[frosty pewter]

@upper wagon how does it compare to UIElement? They're planning for runtime in the future I think

Looks really promising either way, I love the closeness the code is to IMGUI, I imagine an easier transition than the one I've had to UIElement

[upper wagon]

Apparently it's planned somewhere in 2020 for UIE to be usable for game UI, honestly though, not to be overconfident or anything, I just don't see how they'd match the performance

Everything works on unmanaged memory, you're basically just making calls which affect pointers, it's all raw math and can be totally threaded if necessary

[frosty pewter]

(That's good the yoga stuff didn't thread when I tried for UIElement)

[upper wagon]

The only real overhead involved right now is with setting the mesh data, because there are issues with Mesh::GetNativeVertexBufferPtr, so once I get that worked out it'll should get it down to next to nothing

It also has shallow updates currently, so if you dirty the canvas, it only updates from the lowest possible node, and for things like scrollrects there is no rebuild- it just offsets all child vertices

[frosty pewter]

What kind of release are you planning?

[upper wagon]

Also, it's guaranteed 2 drawcalls maximum, ever- one for all geometry (including upto 5 levels of nested 8-bit alpha masks), one for all text

Eh, not too sure, I initially did this because I needed a production UI lib, it's just turned into an asset, hopefully I'll have it pretty much finished by the end of the month though

Thanks for the interest btw, these questions really help, I'm trying to get an idea of use cases

I'm not reall a fan of UI programming but I loved the IMGUI workflow for editor UI, so that's where you see the closeness to IMGUI as far as the workflow goes

[frosty pewter]

I'm mostly an editor programmer so I used to use it a ton and it's very familiar. Now I'm learning CSS and Flex quirks 😔 ... Web-like was never my dream, but there's some amazing stuff I could never do before

Something I'm finding I'm doing often, which is likely more an editor-related task is querying and modifying the UI

Though the only example I can give off the top of my head is a rich text bug where it parses the tags for layout but keeps the text the same so the labels are broken. I ended up recalculating the sizes after creating the UI

[upper wagon]

Well I can definitely say there are no nasty gotchas like that, it's as direct as possible, you just tell it what you want and it takes care of everything, more or less

Also as for querying, it's mostly callback based, so for example you can directly bind an event when you create a button and it'll be fired whenver it's clicked, that sort of thing

I'll also be doing the same in reverse for things like sliders, so you can have a property notify the slider when it's dirty and have it adjust it's level

[frosty pewter]

well, it sounds awesome - I may throw use cases your way when I get time to think about it more

[zinc kraken]

@late remnant Sorry just joined the discord chat. You can also create a simple "UIMesh" class that derives from MaskableGraphic that takes the mesh. In the populate you just call the canvasRenderer.SetMesh() with your mesh and it should just work.

[autumn spire]

thats interesting

[zinc kraken]

its what we have done for a quick particle demo we have internally. it might need to have some shader changes to play nicely as we set so clipping bounds that way but those you can copy from the UI itself

[faint cargo]

hello I couldn't find an example, I want to make a carousel swipe menu, like in iPhone Clock menu

does anyone has such example like this?

I scroll down (or left) the scroll list and the middle item is selected and highlighted (or zoomed in)

[autumn spire]

oh man, I miss iOS6

I would probably implement that as three scroll rects. Listen for an OnPointerDown to understand which of them is "selected" and highlight it appropriately

[faint cargo]

it's all about highlighting

I want it to be a single entity not a triple menu

[autumn spire]

am I mistaken, or is the highlight in above statically positioned?

on later versions of iOS, I do see the font of the underlying contents scale a little bit as they enter the center

which is a nice touch

a few different ways I could see accomplishing this

1.) Add a MonoBehaviour to each item that looks for a Y range and scales/tweaks the contents appropriately
2.) Run a render texture over the entire carousel and draw the middle row twice

[twin geyser]

you could use an asset like Curved UI to map your UI to a cylinder, then just rotate it?

[autumn spire]

oo thats fun

tbh I'm surprised to see the cylinders still in later iOS versions

I thought they didn't mess around with that skeuomorphism nonsense

[thick sundial]

k guys I need some help

my UI is shit

and I want to take some aspects from this

how do you go about importing a font like this

[autumn spire]

grab your favorite - http://blambot.com/

import into text mesh pro

put an outline on it

profit

😄

[thick sundial]

wu

wut

[autumn spire]

what format is your font currently in?

[thick sundial]

Aw darn. It requires money. God dammit life and people wanting compensation for their work.

[thick sundial]

so I'm trying to instantiate some UI elements in

when in a small viewport it looks like this

in fullscreen it looks like this

100% im messing up some UI settings

[wind epoch]

use a canvas scaler with a fixed resolution (of your native output, like 1920*1080) if you don't mind not having pixel perfect UI

[thick sundial]

uuuh where exactly do I set... that?

[wind epoch]

where you have your canvas

you can add a canvas scaler component

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/script-CanvasScaler.html

[thick sundial]

I'm ordering these elements by directly setting their transforms in script

is that bad?

I just want them to maintain a distance

[wind epoch]

if you want to keep that, use rectTransform.anchoredPosition

or you can use an horizontal layout

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/script-HorizontalLayoutGroup.html

it will do this for you, only add children item with your code

[magic briar]

Somehow, I've made my UI sliders follow the mouse without clicking the slider and it's very annoying. Anyone else encountered this or have an idea what might cause this?

[rancid breach]

what code are you using for the sliders?

[unborn hull]

right now im pretty much copying another game's HUD layout/animations and i'd like to make it different but i can't seem to think of anything. any ideas on how i could change up this UI/animation?

[sage viper]

Hello, I have a very difficult issue to profile and I'm hoping someone has some insight on it.

I have a VERY UI-heavy game (that should have been a mobile native app, but nevermind that for now). I have several "Screens", which are each a Canvas inside a single scene.
This allows me to quickly move through "Screens" by enabling/disabling canvases and have all the info loaded, so the games moves fast after the initial load. However, due to the 7-8 canvases with hundreds of elements on the screen, battery usage is pretty high.

To improve this, I'm considering having each "Screen" in a separate scene, and load scenes instead of enabling/disabling canvases.
This would mean a lot more data can be "hardcoded" (so I can just fix some images from editor instead of load them at runtime), and also have a lot fewer elements loaded on screen at a time. However, I would change scenes more often, causing me to re-load lots of assets several times.

My question is, would this separation in multiple scenes help in any way, or is my perfromance better the way it is now? (lots of canvases at the same time, enabled/disabled by usage).

Sorry for the long scenario.

[zinc kraken]

Personally i dont see how having 7-8 canvases and hundreds of elements on the screen when most will be disabled will have much effect on the battery life compared to multiple scenes.

[lucid lotus]

Have in mind that whole Canvas is recreated every time something is moved or changed. So making one canvas for static elements would be useful

[zinc kraken]

Yes though if they are disabled it shouldn't matter

[stable latch]

Hi @sage viper , nice seeing you here
Well, I would say that separate each "scene"/canvas into separate Scenes, if: they are heavy individually, you won't be switching between them many time very frequently, and/or they do not share any thing among them )i.e. there aren't any overlapping UI elements with little communication between them and and logically different part/object of the game)
while, if the above are not true, keeping them in a single scene would be better

The best option imo, which I use personally is a mix of them. If there are some very tightly coupled canvases, I use the same scene, while I use different scene if the canvas if heavy, or has no logical connection to others.

Also, in case there are some UI-Scenes which are light, and share some UI, I prefer adding them to a single canvas, and use Panel, and turn the panels on/off

As you might know, my current project uses a lot of UI. Or I should say it uses only UI, no other visual element. So this is what I am using.

Though, my reasoning is not solely based on performance, but also ease of logical separation of different aspects of the game.

[upper wagon]

https://forum.unity.com/threads/rmgui-a-high-performance-full-ugui-replacement.611884/

Just wanted to post back here now this is further along in development

[frosty pewter]

Still really cool and impressive. I do worry how much I've come to rely on visual editors though. At least in UGUI it's super important. Maybe your IMGUI-likeness makes that a non issue

Still, I'm using UIElement a lot now and even the UIElementDebugger is something I couldn't live without

[dreamy plank]

imgui-ness is awesome for dynamic data such as lists/buttons with unknown number of elements ( you'd go prefab route with ugui which is uncomparable pain in this case )
this has presumably also retained state, so it should be faster than current imgui even

but it looks too good to be true so far tbh - no standard components yet, just demos of fillmodes and a nicely animated toolbar (?)

but color me slightly impressed, will be keeping an eye on it

[upper wagon]

Thanks for the feedback, guys

I definitely understand this from what I've posted so far as far as components go ^^ I had to move from doing everything within Unity to writing a native crossplatform rendering plugin to handle some engine limitations and I haven't extended this to the text rendering engine yet ( will only take an hour or so but I've been focusing on other core aspects) so I don't have any controls to demo right now

But just to be clear, you can currently write labels, handle text input (textfield/textarea, wordwrapping options), create buttons, bind data to them, etc.

I'll add that to the list today so I can demo some of the controls sooner rather than later

[dreamy plank]

no worries ! - can't you reuse at least some TextMeshPro meshes/shaders for example ( have no idea now how practical this might be ) for text rendering ? - supporting all platforms might be a lot of work !
but don't get discouraged - even few of them would be probably awesome :)
good luck !

[upper wagon]

Oh no worries, it's all done

I built a custom MSDF text engine for it

I just need to port it to the native plugin, just gotta restructure my string classes to use the same format

The only thing is, there's no mobile support for now because of API limitations, I go over this in the forum post a little but basically there are so many technicques which aren't possible on any mobile GPU so it'd just end up watering the system down

It's really geared towards gaming platforms, PC, Mac, Linux and consoles

[dreamy plank]

I primarily do stuff for standalones so I'll definitely survive - although mobiles would be welcome addition -
I'll be sure to have a test drive when something usable is out ]

[dreamy plank]

does anybody know about any non Editor IMGUI dropdown/combobox implementation ?

[dreamy plank]

found this - https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/combobox-gui-22790 -
it will need some changes, but base does, surprisingly, seem to work

[hazy meteor]

TMPro font doesnt seem to work for me

Font asset creator seems to have generated the atlas properly so im bit lost now

[hazy meteor]

Not sure what i did but seems to work now

[frosty pewter]

sometimes TMP freaks out and just needs a little bit of time to reset

you'll find you run into that a fair amount

[lucid lotus]

TMPro has this wierd problems, but in editor only

[rare dune]

Ship it 😁

[zinc kraken]

Anyone file a bug report on that behavior or know how to repo it?

[frosty pewter]

I haven't, and also have no idea how to get it to happen. Next time it does I'll keep it in mind

[zinc kraken]

That would be great thanks

Does it mainly happen inside a canvas or is it also in a TextMeshPro component (not the ugui one)

[frosty pewter]

I only use it inside the canvas, so I cannot say, sorry

[slow swift]

Hi all, I'm thinking of implementing in my game some dynamic buttons placed under a World Canvas that would avoid overlapping other game elements so they are always visible: how would you implement it?
I'm currently thinking of using 2D colliders placed on the buttons and have a script that would test for overlap: on success, I'd reposition the button elsewhere and try again. I however don't know if that approach would work...
Any insight or previous experience on the matter would be very appreciated. Thanks.

[unborn hull]

you could have the world canvas render on top by using a second camera with a higher depth buffer (iirc)

[slow swift]

It seems that my question wasn't clear. I'll give another try :)
What I want to achieve is to actually have the UI on world visually mixed with the 3d world: See it as a 3d view on a strategy map for instance where the actual UI would appear in context of the 3d environement.
For instance, let's say you're looking at a terrain on which you can see an enemy Unit: clicking on it would make appear a menu that would be rendered on the XZ plane slightly above the terrain as if it was rendered in Augmented Reality.
So far, there are not much of an issue. But as soon as you introduce multiple units next to each other, you want to make sure that the actual UI surrounding one of these units won't be overlapped by another.
Therefore, I'd like to have this overlapping UI element to move away dynamically from the overlapped 3d element.

The following image should illustrate my words better. If you look at the point of interest that says "MINING COLONY" or "ESA POST", in this pic, they are not overlapping with the planets but if they would, I'd like these texts to change their position on the 3d space so they are kept visible:
https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/fs/216a5f44376523.581f48485eaf7.png

[earnest shale]

Rotate the UI around the "described object" based on the position of the player reported to the "described object"

[oak forge]

@slow swift The Division does that really well. They have a lot of UI overlays that overlay in 3D space. I love how they bring in the map

I've a bunch of screen grabs here

http://www.shanedoherty.com/2018/11/26/the-division/

Maybe starting with something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA2snUe7ARM

Just to learn how to connect UI elements to objects

[zealous atlas]

Hi all, I'm implementing UI and I want a simple enough popup with text using Text Mesh Pro (in Unity 2018.3.5). I want my popup to be able to automatically adjust vertically to the content (text), and since I have a Title Gameobject and a Content Gameobject I can simply put a vertical layout on my popup parent and add a content size fitter. No problem yet. Where I'm stuck is, if I want my Text mesh pro gameobject to adjust their Rect transform to the amount of text I also need to put a layout and content size fitter on it. But then, Unity pops a warning saying the parent already has a layout and I'm not supposed to proceed this way.

So, how am I supposed to proceed to have a Parent vertical layout that adjust to the content, AND children that also adapt their size to their own content?

[slim radish]

you probably need to decouple whatever it is in the parent that requires a layout group.

as in make that layout group and your popup layout group siblings, at the same level, not parent/child

[zealous atlas]

I'm not sure I understand your solution 🤔.
This is what I want to achieve, which is pretty easy with basic Text element, but gets all the more complex with Text Mesh Pro! Because, if I understand correctly, the only way to have the Text Mesh Pro Rect Transform fit to the actual quantity of text displayed is to use a layout + content fitter combo on the Text Mesh Pro Gameobject, hence the warning.

[slim radish]

i'm just saying don't nest the two layout groups

give them a common parent

separate but equal ;p

[zealous atlas]

Which two layout? I have one on the popup gameobject (parent), and one on each of the children (title and content)

[slim radish]

right. why does the popup have to be a child? UI can be at any level

[zealous atlas]

(sorry if I'm being thick, it's late over here)

[slim radish]

it's possible i'm completely misunderstanding as well. it's hard to know without knowing the full scope of the project.

[zealous atlas]

The popup gameobject is not a child, it's directly inside the Canvas gameobject

[slim radish]

but i'd just put each on their own sibling

right all UI is inside a canvas

but it must be inside an element that already has a layout group

or you wouldn't be getting the warning

[zealous atlas]

I have the warning on the Title gameobject and on the Content gameobject, which both have Text Mesh Pro component and their own layout and content fitter so that their rect transform actually fit to the amount of text. This is my hierarchy basically

[slim radish]

can you show me the inspector for all 3?

[zealous atlas]

guh this is frustrating :/ because it's kind of working but also there's this warning ...

[slim radish]

because i'm flying blind a bit hehe

[zealous atlas]

The Popup gameobject (parent)

The title gameobject (child)

the Content gameobject (basically the same as Title)

[slim radish]

ok my bad, the problem isn't the layout groups, it's the nested content size fitter. the one on the parent should handle expanding for all the children

(keyword should)

have you tried removing the child fitters and see what happens?

[zealous atlas]

Yep, that was what I had at the beginning, but I need the fitter for Text Mesh Pro to actually fit its Rect transform to the amount of text displayed, unless you know of any other way to make the Rect Transform of a gameobject using TMPro fit the amount of text?

[slim radish]

is it working with the fitter?

[zealous atlas]

yes

[slim radish]

ok, then i'd just ignore the warning.

[zealous atlas]

without I just have this (text overflowing and no fitting)

[slim radish]

there's a lot of talk about this here:

https://answers.unity.com/questions/1158537/ui-nested-vertical-layout-groups.html

and seems the consensus is, if it works, roll with it

it is just a warning after all

[zealous atlas]

yes, that's what I've done since I've encountered this issue before but I was wondering if anyone knew of a proper way to do this :/ because the warning is not really nice, and I don't want to discover new issues later because of an ignored warning. But I guess I have no choice, this issue has thread on many forum since 2015 ....

anyway, thanks a lot for your time and your help 👍

[slim radish]

ideally, you'd have the parent fitter resize the children. but it sounds like, as you say, textmeshpro is using the fitter in a different way, so you really have no choice.

I doubt it will cause any issues, but wouldn't hurt to test it at various resolutions to be sure

[zealous atlas]

hopefully. thanks again 😃

[slow swift]

@oak forge thanks mate. This is close to what I'm looking for and thanks for the tutorial video: Even if I'm more than aware of how I can achieve much of Unity UI stuff, it's always good to have a small refresh ;)

I believe I'll just have to test with these 2D colliders and see if I can code some dynamic spacing algorithm depending on colliders close to the UI elements. Thanks.

[oak forge]

@slow swift let us know how it goes. I'd love to mess about with that also

[worn ravine]

does anyone have any good examples showing how to make wireframes / flow map for a desktop game UI?

[remote nest]

Hello is there a way to make 2 sided bars. I have a variable that has negative and positive values. I want to show it as a scale bar. if positive fills right side and vice versa?

[cloud vault]

https://twitter.com/kalobrienz/status/1097441177266282496?s=19

Kal CorgiBits (@kalobrienz)

We've started to solidify our battle UI for @KorRPG ! My god UI is extremely difficult to get right but it was a good learning process. #pixelart #gamedev #IndieGameDev #indiegame #madewithunity
As always RT's appreciated! https://t.co/WAGhbZ1fJM

▶ Play video

Twitter

[jolly rover]

so cool

[rapid bay]

@remote nest either use two bars as if it were one with opposite fill directions, or a custom fill shader.

[tired pier]

This is my article about UX/UI & game design analysis on a game that I worked on last summer: https://medium.com/toge-productions/brewing-a-meaningful-experience-in-coffee-talk-c492a24f2c3b Hope you find it interesting & resourceful! 😃

[ocean forge]

I'm just starting to use unity and I'm trying to figure out how to get my UI to fit within a panel I have. This is how I want the UI to look regardless of the screen you're on

However what's happening is this:

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can make the content within that center square panel always stay in the same relative location with the same relative size?

Or am I completely doing this wrong

The center panel has an aspect ratio fitter on it

[real arch]

Just use the anchors to size the elements like the buttons and text and keep the pixel offset to 0

[flat trout]

can anyone refer me to a usage guide for the UI default shader so i can make use of it's stencil/masking?

i've read the docs on the shaderlab stencil settings and theres a lot of overlap there but they say to set certain values to things like LEQUAL etc but the target paramaters are stored as float, and when i try to use INT's as index into list of options, i get no results

the three tint regions inside the code in the white square there and merge them, so the two gray areas become one solid region of color with no visible overlap, and the yellow stripe is over it in a way that is not blended with the gray it masks it out

i'm testing now with versions that use 100% alpha and that does achieve the desired look but ideally this would be done in a way that could still be alpha blended

maybe this image better shows the goal:

[tardy apex]

Is this script the generally accepted solution to have a scrollview scroll follow your selection with controllers or keyboard input? https://bitbucket.org/UnityUIExtensions/unity-ui-extensions/src/master/Scripts/Utilities/UIScrollToSelection.cs?at=master It seemed like it. Just wanted to see what other's have done. Thanks!

[slim radish]

I've tried a lot of 'scroll to selection' scripts and honestly I've yet to find one i like. they do it about the same way though. I'm still hoping i find the holy grail which keeps the selection centered as best it can. All the ones i try tend to just move it to the very top or bottom edge of the selection area which bugs me.

but it's been about a year since i messed with that particular UI issue myself. I decided i was wasting too much time on it and moved on for the time being

i'm not sure i tried that particular one, i'll have to put it in my 'to try' list

[tardy apex]

Ok. Thank you! Yeah, I tried that script and it's not... great. But functional.

It turns out I don't actually need a scroll view, I added one in case this screen I'm designing needs more room. But for now I can avoid it. 😃

I may just end up writing my own scroll to script if I need, and I'd be more than happy to share it as open source.

Thanks again!

[slim radish]

no problem 😃

[flat trout]

the scroll view i'm making now is another 'up to the edge' variant i guess

although mine also tracks if mouse button is still down and if user dragged out of the view into a 'scroll the window' zone (anywhere outside of view) it continuously smooth scrolls until they release then it gradually stops

ceebee can you describe a little more the ideal behavior you'd like

[faint cargo]

I'm trying to move a object to a position of an another object (they are all UI) and the thing is the location I want to go is under another object. I'm basically trying to get the exact position of a child. but when I try to move onto the child object, I come to the middle of the parent object. I use child.transform.position to get its global location
am I missing something?

[slim radish]

@flat trout https://imgur.com/PdjBn8z

the problem is as you scroll through, where your selection is drifts toward the end you're nearing

i'd like the selected item to be in the center, until you're near the top/bottom and can't scroll any farther, and then it can move to the end. but it constantly drifing with each scroll is just flaky behavior IMHO.

[flat trout]

🤔

thanks a lot for that, good for me to consider

[slim radish]

especially when using a mouse, having the selected constantly moving means you tend to get mis-scrolls a lot

because you might move your mouse to a line to select it, but then it jumps to a different position than you expect

having it mostly always in the center is just more consistent

[flat trout]

yeah should be easy enough, just record the offset from the top and make sure that is maintained as it scrolls

[distant otter]

How to get my toggle to play and stop? Pressing the button starts the audio, but pressing it again triggers the audio for the second time. Instead I want a basic start (first press) / stop (second press).

[distant otter]

anyone? 🤔

[frosty pewter]

Either make two buttons that toggle between each other, make a new button class that is a toggle, or implement a function that acts as a toggle and call that

[distant otter]

@frosty pewter I'm not a programmer, can you point me to a yt vid?

[frosty pewter]

Do the two button trick then. Others may be able to help with code if needed in #💻┃code-beginner

If you just make two buttons that disable+enable each other and have opposite functions you can avoid coding

[distant otter]

I'm making an app with around 30 buttons, that would mean the need of another 30 to stop each of them. Instead, I'm hoping to have 30+1 with the 1 being a stop button for whichever soundbite is playing

like a "kill" switch 😄

Hmm maybe a dirty workaround is possible, how about a button that 'resets' the entire app, is that possible?

@frosty pewter nevermind, found a restartgame script and thus my killswitch, instantly killed the audio so it works, most likely not the proper way to do it, but yeah, thanks

[elfin tree]

Anyone have any recommendations for twitter accounts or games that do 8 or 16 bit UI/UX well?

I'm starting to get into pixel art and I'm really falling apart thinking of how to design a good looking menu system.

[remote nest]

hello, i have a canvas (in world space) under a character. it is in 3D. I'm trying to handle how to transfer that canvas in normal overlay canvas and follow characters accordingly. because in world space it's not working well, there are camera functions that rotates around.

i want to move it to normal UI canvas

[slim radish]

so you want to take the world space Canvas and at some point turn it into a screen space Canvas at runtime?

so it's no longer in the world?

[flat trout]

any chance someone knows how to prevent an inspector TextArea from always selecting all the text every time you click in it?

it's so annoying

i dunno whats up with unity and text fields but it's like they went out of their way to make them as absolutely terrible as possible

really hope they do something about how unusable all the text fields/text areas are soon

I have a textArea with a list of 'spawnEnemy()' type commands in it that happen sequentially over the progress of my level, which is all working fine but if i ever want to add a new line or something in there, i click, it selects all, not where i clicked, i click again, it maybe selects where i clicked, it maybe flashes and selects all text again, and after 5-15 tries at this i'm eventually able to place my cursor somehwere i can type

[warm crane]

I've never really had an issue with it, but just looking now it seems like it's too sensitive to movement. Move the cursor 1 pixel while clicking and it

it will select all the text again

Are you using a trackpad? I mostly use keyboard shortcuts for as much as possible, so i hadn't noticed any issues after >7 years in unity lol

[flat trout]

does it not do it if you hold the mouse completely still? maybe i could get better at that

[warm crane]

Yeah. So first click it selects all, then second click with no movement will put the uhhmm.. blinking cursor bit where your mouse cursor is

[flat trout]

i think maybe a custom inspector i have grafted onto this one is monkeying around with something somewhere

[warm crane]

brain fart, can't remember proper names

Oh maybe!

[flat trout]

caret?

i think caret is the word

[warm crane]

Yeah 😆 that's right

[flat trout]

i'll check when it's done building

[warm crane]

👍

Also if it's hard for your to click with a still mouse maybe you could adjust your mouse sensitivity

[flat trout]

i have a marginally better scrollable multiline textfield control i eventually struggled through creating maybe i can make an editor window for it that i can have popped up with a specified string source/target as a custom attribute or something

maybe, it's not abnormally sensitive it's a g502 gaming mouse thats generally doing fine for me

nah even with the custom editor commented out and all default everything it still does it

maybe just a little less? kinda hard to tell.

for multiline it should not do that 'select all on click' behavior, that's only helpful for single line textfields and even then... debatably

[harsh cradle]

Hey guys, so we have a team of Unity devs and none of us know how to make good, animated UI inside of Unity.

How would you guys even go about making something simple like this quest tracker animation seen on the right hand side of Diablo when they complete a quest?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slW-ige8_Cc&t=2799s

[warm crane]

Should be able to do that with a few sprites, a text item (text mesh pro is generally recommended over unity text) and a tweening library. Can happily recommend DOTween for tweening

[flat trout]

@harsh cradle kind of a lot of ways to approach that

if you like the way i'm using to bring up the communications window in this WIP here i can walk you through that

https://blockh34d.itch.io/glgame1

its not as nice as diablos tho

you could probably build it up from this tho, wouldn't be hard

while you're at it try my game out a little and see if you think it's too easy to shoot the air-based enemies, thanks 😄

[harsh cradle]

Will give it a shot in the morning 👍🏼😄

[flat trout]

ping me if you want and i'll outline the code involved

its a mix of code and animations

[thick sundial]

for some reason particles are not appearing in the game view
scene view

game view

also if I have a image texture go over them in the game view

I cant seem to get it to render on top no matter what I do

[slim radish]

I think that's normal. you can't have UI elements over particles

[thick sundial]

you mean I can't have particles over UI elements?

[slim radish]

if you mean particles on the UI itself, then yeah that's not possible

https://techblog.king.com/showing-particles-in-a-screen-space-overlay-canvas/

there is a workaround that can be tried in certain circumstances

[thick sundial]

huh

alright then

[opaque nest]

If anyone didn't know, because I didn't. Adobe's XD, designing and prototyping software is actually free.

[warm crane]

Ooooh, cooool

[twin nymph]

Link?

[unborn hull]

not that hard to google but here
https://www.adobe.com/products/xd.html

[polar rain]

Adobe is being Adobe, I've followed the link, it prompted to change the region, which I did. The local site doesn't have any mention of a free product. So for those outside US - dismiss the region prompt and continue to download.

[distant otter]

new problem, this is my view, yet when I build the scene, stuff is all over the place, the majority of which seems to moved to the topright corner, what do I need to do to have my build exactly as what I'm seeing in the camera?

this is how the build looks

[distant otter]

anyone?

[slim radish]

really difficult to say

is the screen resolution of the game pane the same as the resolution you're running the build at?

is there anything on the camera that might move it or change it's FOV?

otherwise I don't see why it wouldn't appear exactly how you see it in editor

also might be helpful to state if the canvas is worldspace or screenspace

[distant otter]

@slim radish well first of all, if I'm correct, the canvas resolution adapts to the resolution I have of my screen, correct? And the dimensions of it cannot be changed. I have it on screenspace overlay as unity's tutorial advised me to, and I tried both perspective and ortho, no difference there

my main image is 1600x900, which is the panel you see in the pic, plus the darker background, it's not 3D but a 2D png

ideally my build will be completely filled with that png image, so without unity's blue background in it, and I don't mind losing a little bit of my image, it's the reason I added that background

my problem is, I have no clue how unity translates what I am seeing in my editor, to the final builds

so I have no clue where to look and what I need to adjust

what I want at the end is simple: a windowed built around 1600x900, with my entire panel on it, and everything in the correct position and working 😄

[slim radish]

that's why i'm asking questions, because I have no earthly idea why this is happening.

never happened in any build I've done

[distant otter]

oke let's reverse engineer this

if I want a final built around 1600x900, what are the settings that I definitely need to have and where to set them?

is this correct?

[slim radish]

https://i.imgur.com/ImzlxxX.png

well this is what I use, because I want it to adapt to the user's screen resolution

[distant otter]

I tried that as well, didn't solve it

[slim radish]

yeah I don't think this part is a factor

going to be a Canvas setting most likely

[distant otter]

for some weird reason, my editor camera is seeing the entire canvas, but my build camera is only seeing the bottomleft corner, so I searched in the hierarchy for maybe a ghost cam, and I really only have one

[slim radish]

https://i.imgur.com/zHTtWEp.png

this is pretty much the standard config I use for all canvases

(camera is filled in at runtime)

[distant otter]

so this means that my editor cam is completely screwed up, assuming that the build part of unity is prob fine

[slim radish]

you do have a canvas scaler I hope?

i use 800x720 because it's an average lowest resolution i want to support

[distant otter]

well no, I kept everything at default lool

[slim radish]

so i make my UI to that lowest denominator, and on higher resolutions is scaled up to match screen res

[distant otter]

oke let me try exactly that, see what happens

[slim radish]

it's not perfect, but works decently well

https://i.imgur.com/lHAhbYw.png

some cavnases I do use Overlay instead of camera

but config is still basically the same

[distant otter]

nope didn't work, I put the player settings on fullscreen window, and have the exact same settings as your screenshot, and still got the bottomleft corner

I really don't get this

[slim radish]

yeah i don't know, what do your camera settings look like?

[distant otter]

like this

[slim radish]

i'm not sure orthographic is what you want. not for the UI camera

https://i.imgur.com/a4sMfxo.png

this is my UI camera

try disabling that camera temporarily and adding a new one

try setting it up as perspective

and see if that changes things

ignore the stuff i have about 'depth only' and 'depth'

that's for overlaying multiple cameras like I do

i use a separate camera for UI and main scene

but if this works, and you do need Orthgraphic for your game, you may have to do likewise

[distant otter]

ok I disabled the problematic camera and added a fresh new

the only way I get everything into camera view, is to crank up the field of view, maybe that isn't the correct way to do it?

[slim radish]

which type of canvas is it again?

screenspace - overlay or screenspace camera?

[distant otter]

I now have it on overlay

let's start with the basics because this is bugging me a lot

my screen at home is 1920x1080

[slim radish]

it should automatically size to the camera

no matter what the fov is

[distant otter]

my image is 1600x900

[slim radish]

that's what the canvas scaler does

[distant otter]

all I want is that my build is a nice 1600x900 window floating on my screen 😄

[slim radish]

yeah i don't know, it shouldn't be this hard lol

[distant otter]

this is literally the only thing left and then my app is finished loool

[slim radish]

only thing i guess i can suggest is to get something like Unity's UI project and see how they do it

they show examples of all the types of UI

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/essentials/unity-samples-ui-25468

maybe you can spot what you have different

[distant otter]

let me re-watch the tuts again

this is insane

ok I'm done for today, this is just insane, something simple as this and even google can't find it

if anyone else who happens to be a master related to camera's etc, please stand up, because I cannot to cancel my project based on this stupid problem

[distant otter]

I changed the sprite image to show it more clear, but why does it appear on a different location in the live view?

[slim radish]

can't help but notice you have the game view set to 0.42 scale it looks ilke

what happens when you set it to 1.0 scale

https://i.imgur.com/YzgswSw.png

[distant otter]

then I need to change it to 16:9

[slim radish]

yes

[distant otter]

which then looks like this

[slim radish]

😬

[distant otter]

I tried to moving the cam forward/backward, and that 'solved' the issue that my view was not entirely filled

but I'm guessing it comes with other new issues which is the overlay buttons are completely misaligned

my theory is: when you have an image, in my case the panel with buttons, and you add UI buttons on top of that, the UI buttons should appear on the exact same spot that I laid out for each of them, regardless of the angle or FOV of the camera; it only changes when the distance between my image and those UI buttons are huge

so what I did is moving my image 0.1 to the back, just to be 100% sure the UI buttons are in front of it

[slim radish]

they should

which is why i have no idea why that's not happening here

you looked at the examples to see if anything is different?

[distant otter]

yes but I can't compare it with my situation, in the example the background image are actually exactly that, so there is space between it and the UI

[slim radish]

well that's not the important part

[distant otter]

in my situation, that background image is actually a static part of the UI, and the only thing dynamic are UI buttons that I place in front of it

[slim radish]

or wait, are you saying your UI background isn't part of the canvas?

[distant otter]

it is part of the canvas

all my UI elements are part of the canvas

[slim radish]

ok then they should all stay the relative size and position, no matter the camera size

unless you have some components that would interfere with that

like horizontal/vertical scalers etc

[distant otter]

unless those scalers are made automatically, I don't have them

[slim radish]

generally they aren't no

what version of unity do you have?

[distant otter]

2018.3.6.f1

the hard part is that I can't seem to analyze this, I do photography as a hobby so my awareness of space and objects in space is fine, I just don't understand how Unity works with this

and after googling I found so many people asking the same questions as me for something that should be a no brainer, as in, 2D scenes should be easy to create 1:1 compared to 3D scenes

lool it's like unity is forcing me to create a full 3D scene

[slim radish]

https://i.imgur.com/GOHTVdj.png

i made a quick project using my settings. as you can see it stays proportional no matter the aspect ratio or resolution

https://i.imgur.com/D8zg2EI.png

i will put it for download give me a min to rar it and put it on my google drive

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Yni4wVtAMs_6s6U-JCQvrh9TavPcuBlr

[distant otter]

out of desperation, I've started to relocate those buttons by aligning them using the live view window haha ... while in the ditor window they fall outside my panel

oke, will download your test

[slim radish]

https://i.imgur.com/H6A1Gxt.png

built version

https://i.imgur.com/tGNdGii.png

[distant otter]

oke give me a minute

[slim radish]

yeah just wanted to show how it behaves with different aspect ratios

i did it as screen space-overlay as that's what i think you said you were using.

also the two right icons are siblings of the background

and the two left are children of the background, just to show it shouldn't matter

canvas scaler should scale everything equally

[distant otter]

hmm yeah this is weird, so my panel image would be your game border image, and my UI buttons would be your ingame artifact images

[slim radish]

yes

[distant otter]

so the swords move and resize according to the border, and the elixirs according to the view resolution

your cam is positioned bottom left corner, yet has everything in view, how is that possible

[slim radish]

well, in a sense, the border gets scaled by resolution

so it's change in scale directly affect the children

which is how normal scaling works even ouside the UI

if a parent scales, the children do too

[distant otter]

yes that I get

let me open my project again and see what is different

what I did is move the camera position so it has everything in view

[slim radish]

one thin you'll notice I don't do, is force a particular resolution in the settings

i'm kind of concerned if you're doing that, it's the source of your problems

or possibly related

i guess i should try forcind and see what I get

no, still works

so must be something else

[distant otter]

well I'm not sure if I need to force it, I just know that my panel image is 1600x900, so if it autoscales up, it would show less quality

so I need to force it to maintain the quality of the image, as it's part of the UI from the user perspective

[slim radish]

yeah that's fine

[distant otter]

thanks for helping me out, maybe someday in the future this will be a lot easier 😄

it would be so nice if tools follow human logic

[slim radish]

"But Captian, Humans are fundamentally Illogical."

nobody asked you spock 😛

[distant otter]

if that is true, humans wouldn't be capable of programming and thus creating a tool like Unity 😉

so some humans are illogical, just so happens some of them work at unity lol

[slim radish]

lol

[distant otter]

repositioning 40+ buttons ...

[slim radish]

https://i.imgur.com/mL9jJec.png

[distant otter]

@slim radish app is done, seems to work fine lol

bit scared to release it, just sent the download link to the people who contributed their voice

[slim radish]

if it works for you it should work for everyone 😃

[distant otter]

haha isn't that one of the worst assumptions a dev can make?! 😄

[slim radish]

shhhhhh stop with the secrets :p

[distant otter]

haha

[slim radish]

yeah the truth is no matter how much you test, someone, somewhere, will find a way to do something you never, ever thought of.

[distant otter]

yeah

[simple musk]

Is there a way to stop a vertical layout group resetting the horizontal position of its children when I add a new object to it.
I’m trying to use it to create a timeline allowing you to move objects left and right but snapped to a row. when I add a new child all the other child’s positions are reset.

[tiny copper]

@simple musk try unchecking "child force expand width" and check "child controls width"

also, anyone here know how to work with Scrollbar.OnPointerDown? it's not an event but a public method?

[unique pier]

how do i make a ui image same size as a 2d sprite object?

[slim radish]

There is a "set native size" button in the inspector for the UI image. clicking that should do it.

https://i.imgur.com/utmopWp.png

[lyric talon]

Heya, I've struggled with this for 2 hours now, so figured I might wanna ask the experts: Is there a way to use ContentSizeFitters or LayoutGroups to handle my use case:
I want an Image behind a TMPUGUI text (which also works as a button). The text is unpredictable: It's length varies (localization), and font size depends on screen resolution (min 18, max 128).

Without either a CSF or LG I can set the RectTrans to anchor, say, x0.1-0.9, y0.4-0.6, and the text fills the available space until it hits either max width or height, leaving the rest blank.

Adding a CSF, the text either collapses to minimum (Minimum), or expands to maximum (Preferred) font size. Neither of those helps, as maximum can be too large for some screens, and minimum is... tiny.
LGs don't have the problem of font going all wonky, but won't adjust the text's RectTrans to "trim" the dead space. The background image always ends up going from 0.1 to 0.9, even if the text fits in 0.4-0.6, for instance.

Is there a way to have an Image fit an unpredictable TMPUGUI? Or do I need to step in and programmatically set the text's font size at run-time, negating some of TMPro's advantages?

[unique pier]

hi i have some sprites that i am tryin to sclae them for all aaspect ratios

it looks fine in 1080 1920

but for this resolution it shows like this

how can i stretch the image n such a way that it fills the width and also keep its aspect ratio?

btw its a 2d sprite object not ui element

[sinful gull]

@unique pier stretching somthing without distorting it is intrically impossible. I would use two seperate images if you need both aspect ratios without any margin or stretching. If you don't mind distortion, I use Screen.width/height( which return the width and heigh in pixels for screen size) for relative positional data of ui elements. As per option 1, I've used PS to intellegently stretch an image without too much noticeable distortion

[unique pier]

i see thank you @sinful gull