Unity 4.6 = rebuild Zuulite Miner

I knew Unity were working on a new UI system to be released with Unity version 4.6 when I was first working on Zuulite Miner. I thought it would have been a nice-to-have but I managed to do most of the things I needed with 2D Sprites, 2D Box Colliders and a little ingenuity. I was pretty pleased with version 0.106 of Zuulite Miner on iOS until iOS 8 was released and broke it!

Anyway, now I have made the effort to look into it the new UI stuff is pretty tasty. Last time I worked on Zuulite Miner I was trying to make a scrolling panel and having the overflow of that panel clipped out of view. Very tricky without using two cameras, which causes its own problems.

So I started Zuulite Miner from a new blank project. Laid out the UI again using the new system in an afternoon and had the scroll panel working without writing a single line of code in just a few hours. Then I copied across all the game logic classes that I wanted to keep from version 0.106 and ripped out anything that interacted with the UI. Then updated the necessary classes to make use of the new IPointerClick interface and was right back to where I left off with the exception that the game’s UI looked great and also scaled itself for the different aspect ratios of different mobile devices… brilliant!

Oh, I did also take the opportunity to upgrade to the latest beta of TextMeshPro. This was necessary to make it work with Unity’s new RectTransform object but also brought a couple of other benefits. Signed Distance Field fonts look amazing!