What's the best way to load popup, full-screen windows?

Hi,

I'm trying to create a menu system where the entire screen is temporarily taken over, while the player remains 'in' the world.

For example, you walk up to a barkeep, and the 3D game cuts to a 2D picture of the barkeep with some words on the screen, and a button to accept and one to cancel. When the screen goes away, you resume playing.

What I have been doing for the last umpteen years is creating a prefab of the UI elements, and turning them on and off. I did that with nGUI and now uGUI, and I assume that's just how it's done.

But I'm curious if anyone does something like this, with the addScene additively. Is that a better way to do it?

Thanks!
-Chilton

 

It would have to read from disk every time you brought-up a menu which is significantly less performant. I wouldn't, unless you have lots of hi-res images in your different menu screens and, together, they take up an unreasonable amount of memory.

 

If you have several of these full screen windows which pop up and just show different content, I'd just have a single window as part of the scene which has a control script which controls what to change text fields to and enable/disable child objects. Effectively using a single window to be reused each time.

That is of course if the content of these windows is not so memory hungry that it would be a problem having all of it loaded into memory at the same time.