Handling user input. (Question)

Hello everyone,

I was wondering what the best way to handle input. In my game there are a bunch of hex tiles, which have their own instanced classes with properties, such as coordinates, resources, buildings, etc... Whenever a player clicks on a tile I activate a UI element which grabs the data from the tile based on a ray cast and displays it.

First question - is activating and deactivating UI GameObjects a legit way of handling UI? I'm pretty new at this so I don't know how its generally done.

Second question - currently whenever the player left clicks at all the UI will activate, even if the player is for example placing a building. What is the best way to ensure the UI will turn on only in certain scenarios? I was thinking of creating a static class with bools, and only activating the UI if all of them are false, but that seems like a terrible solution, as every time I have a condition that prevents the UI from turning on id have to add a bool, then make sure it is set properly each time. For multiple UI elements that just seems like a nightmare.

Thanks.

 

Yep this is pretty standard practice.

It really depends on how your project is structured, but a fairly straightforward way is to deactivate or disable whichever component is responsible for the ui raycasting when appropriate.

 

That gives me an idea. I think I will create a bunch of MonoBehaviours on a UI controller GameObject and enable/disable them as needed.

Thanks!

 

your questions are valid, but there are no strict rules or guidelines on how to organize your inner logic, as long as it works.

if you'd hate seeing a bunch of bools (and I do recommend gathering everything related into one "UI controller" place), I get you -- but you can do it however you want, with bitwise flags, dynamic conditions, system events, even dictionaries.

just don't overdo it, it's just a UI. it's always a bit messy.

for multiple UI components that act like radio buttons, you just want an int

Code (csharp):

1. // obviously you call this only when there is a demand for update
2. for(int i = 0; i < uiPanelCount; i++) getUIPanel(i).SetActive(i == currentPanel);

(of course this is just a boilerplate, you need to supply the missing pieces yourself, and refer to the actual UI panels from some array or list)