Game Interface Elements

Unity gives you a number of options for creating your game's graphic user interface (GUI). You can use GUI Text and GUI Texture objects in the scene, or generate the interface from scripts using UnityGUI.

The rest of this page contains a detailed guide for getting up and running with UnityGUI.

GUI Scripting Guide

Overview

UnityGUI allows you to create a wide variety of highly functional GUIs very quickly and easily. Rather than creating a GUI object, manually positioning it, and then writing a script that handles its functionality, you can do everything at once with just a few lines of code. The code produces GUI controls that are instantiated, positioned and handled with a single function call.

For example, the following code will create and handle a button with no additional work in the editor or elsewhere:-

// JavaScript
function OnGUI () {
	if (GUI.Button (Rect (10,10,150,100), "I am a button")) {
		print ("You clicked the button!");
	}
}


// C#
using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;

public class GUITest : MonoBehaviour {

	void OnGUI () {
		if (GUI.Button (new Rect (10,10,150,100), "I am a button")) {
			print ("You clicked the button!");
		}
	}
}

Although this example is very simple, there are very powerful and complex techniques available for use in UnityGUI. GUI construction is a broad subject but the following sections should help you get up to speed as quickly as possible. This guide can be read straight through or used as reference material.

UnityGUI Basics

This section covers the fundamental concepts of UnityGUI, giving you an overview as well as a set of working examples you can paste into your own code. UnityGUI is very friendly to play with, so this is a good place to get started.

Controls

This section lists every available Control in UnityGUI, along with code samples and images showing the results.

Customization

It is important to be able to change the appearance of the GUI to match the look of your game. All controls in UnityGUI can be customized with GUIStyles and GUISkins, as explained in this section.

Layout Modes

UnityGUI offers two ways to arrange your GUIs: you can manually place each control on the screen, or you can use an automatic layout system which works in a similar way to HTML tables. Either system can be used as desired and the two can be freely mixed. This section explains the functional differences between the two systems, including examples.

Extending UnityGUI

UnityGUI is very easy to extend with new Control types. This chapter shows you how to make simple compound controls - complete with integration into Unity's event system.

Extending Unity Editor

The GUI of the Unity editor is actually written using UnityGUI. Consequently, the editor is highly extensible using the same type of code you would use for in-game GUI. In addition, there are a number of Editor-specific GUI controls to help you create custom editor GUI.

Page last updated: 2011-11-17