How do I add this to my game ?
If you’re starting a brand new game, or if you don’t have a GUI in your scene right now, the fastest way is to just drag and drop the NiceTouchUICamera prefab (located in Demos/NiceTouchTestScene/Prefabs/) into your scene. If you already have a GUI, that’s also the fastest way, but you’ll want to drag that prefab into the scene, unfold it and just take its MMControls part, and put it into your existing canvas.
Then, you’ll (potentially) want to reposition the controls to your liking. They’re built using Unity’s uGUI best practices, if you’re not familiar with it, there’s tons of info over at Unity’s website. Basically you can just move stuff around like you would any other object. You’ll also probably want to remove some controls (who needs two joysticks and a D-pad ?).
Now, all that’s left to do is bind these controls to your game. The Nice Touch controls target functions, methods from your game’s classes. Usually, you’ll want to target either an InputManager class, that handles all your existing (keyboard or gamepad) input, or maybe target your characters directly. The first method was chosen for the Corgi Engine integration, and there’s an example of the second one in the CubeCylinderSphere demo scene. In any case, the main idea is the same. Your controls have to be linked to a method. When they’re interacted with, they’ll trigger this (or these) method(s).
This means you’ll need clean methods on your game’s side. For example, here are the methods on my test CharacterMovement class. They’re extremely basic, but you’ll get the idea :
public virtual void Move(Vector2 newMovement)
{
if (!_axisBased)
{
_horizontalMovement = newMovement.x;
_verticalMovement = newMovement.y;
}
}
public virtual void Jump()
{
_rigidbody.AddForce(Vector3.up * (JumpForce * -Physics.gravity.y));
}
As you can see, calling the Jump method (once) will make the character go up in the air, and passing a Vector2 to the Move method will modify the horizontal and vertical movement values of the character, which will then be applied to its position at Update(). Now if I want to have a button trigger the jump for that character everytime it’s pressed for the first time (before a release), here’s what I have to do :
- Select the button in the Hierarchy panel
- In the button’s inspector, in the MMTouchButton component part, in the ButtonPressedFirstTime() box, select my character in the Object property
- In the newly populated dropdown of that same box, select my character’s class, and then my Jump method
- That’s it.
As you can see, there’s not much to it. Here are a few remarks :
- Joysticks and arrows require “dynamic” methods. Which is Unity’s way of naming methods that take one (or more) parameters. Joysticks will need a method that takes a Vector2 as a parameter, and Arrows will require a method with a float parameter.
- These “dynamic” methods will always be at the very top when you open your character’s class dropdown from the inspector
- For joysticks, you need to select the joystick knob to make changes, the upper level gameobject is just the “base” of your joystick, and is purely cosmetic, get rid of it if you want
- For joysticks, a Target Camera must be set. If you’ve just drag and dropped and are using the UICamera prefab, there’s nothing to do. If you’ve changed the main UI camera, you’ll just need to specify it (it’s the first item in the MMTouchJoystick’s inspector)
- For all the controls, from the inspector, you can change the pressed opacity, this is the opacity that will be applied when the control is interacted with
How does platform detection work?
If you look at the Hierarchy panel, you’ll see that all the controls are nested under a MMTouchControls gameobject. This gameobject is basically just a CanvasGroup with a MMTouchControls component. It’s this component that handles (if you want to use it) mobile detection. It works in a very simple way : if you’re targeting a mobile platform (iOS or Android), it’ll show the controls when you press play. If you’re targeting another platform, it’ll hide them. You can also force one mode or the other from the inspector.
My buttons click themselves when I hover over them with a mouse!
That’s probably because you haven’t checked “mouse mode” on your button. MouseMode should always be checked if you’re planning to use a mouse with your game, and unchecked otherwise.