Best practice for UI based "slides"
Hi! This is probably an easy one, but I was wondering if someone can give me some input.
I am working on a 2d point & click / visual novel.
I need to have custom "slides" with text and images that will pop up every now and then via actionlists. The format is not homogeneous (they're like collages), so I can't have them as pages of a generic document or journal.
I thought of different options:
1- Creating a Unity UI based menu for each slide and control its visibility via actions. Which would be kinda cumbersome since there are many of these "slides". But I can neatly link the texts to menu elements, which allows for gathering text for translation / voice work.
2- Creating a single "slide" menu and then have each slide as a different animation frame, so that I can switch it via action.
3- Not creating a menu and instead having many UIs sitting around in world space, and then simply switching the camera via action.
I like 2, but the problem with 2 and 3 would be that the text remains inaccessible for translation, since it is not linked to a menu... unless there is a way to reference it?
Well, any help from more experienced creators will be highly appreciated!!!
Thank you in advance!
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Comments
For automatic translation inclusion, you'd have to make it a Unity UI-based menu. But you needn't create a separate menu for each slide - you can attach an Animator to the Canvas that hides/shows different slides, and control its state with an Object: Animate Action.
The other way would be to use Global String variables for all text, and then just reference them in your UI. If it's linked to an AC menu, you can use tokens (i.e. [var:2] in place of variable 2), but you can also get variable values through script. See the Manual's "Variable scripting" chapter for more on this.
It's also possible to create custom translation scripts that will be included in AC's text-gathering process. See the Manual's "Custom translatables" chapter for details, as well as the included CustomTranslatableExample.cs script.
Got it! Yes, I will do the one menu with an animator attached. Thank you, Chris!