Text

Obviously, if you have a female avatar you should put a heart tattoo on your breast and users will need to look at it to determine how much health you have left. Ahh... one of my favorite UX disasters in a game! :D

Seriously, the most minimal UI necessary is going to be the best UI. You could try things like 3D text objects and see how well those work, but anything 2D I just don't think is going to look right as a standalone object. It's going to break the immersion. Try putting some screens in the game that users can interact with would be my recommendation. Depending on the game, you could try doing a watch or a smartphone or something that would help with the menus/UI without breaking the immersion.

"bklooster" wrote:
Obviously, if you have a female avatar you should put a heart tattoo on your breast and users will need to look at it to determine how much health you have left. Ahh... one of my favorite UX disasters in a game! :D

Seriously, the most minimal UI necessary is going to be the best UI. You could try things like 3D text objects and see how well those work, but anything 2D I just don't think is going to look right as a standalone object. It's going to break the immersion. Try putting some screens in the game that users can interact with would be my recommendation. Depending on the game, you could try doing a watch or a smartphone or something that would help with the menus/UI without breaking the immersion.

I was not planning on just having floating text. Being more specific... Say If I have a monitor/screen in game, like on a control panel of a spaceship, and I want it to display "FIND A MISSION" text, maybe have it blinking also.

I guess I could do it with an animated texture map but I really want it to have dynamic text.

I guess I could create 3D Text Mesh, have a orthographic camera pointing to it and render to texture but I assume it would not be very performant?

This is more of a technical question rather than creative ways to display text...

Thoughts?


John

Yeah, it's an interesting problem. I don't have a kit yet, so I'm not confident yet in what works better than others.

I haven't used the built-in Unity GUI options for UI in a long time (NGUI for me). However, just doing some tests the GameObject -> Create Other > 3D Text is what you're looking for. A series of planes that are UV mapped to a font texture. As long as the target of the text is going to be flat I think the system will work. I don't believe the performance shouldn't be all that less performant than the built-in GUI text.

If you need to apply it to a curved surface you're going to either need to apply a vertex shader so that the vertices are distorted in the same way as the surface, or an easier option would be to render the text onto a RenderTexture and then use that texture on an appropriately UV mapped mesh. However, as you mentioned doing this will effectively double the texture ram of the text (one for the font texture and one for the screen's render texture).

If you want 3D spacial text you're probably going to want to pick up something like TTF text http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/141946-TTFText-1-1-Advanced-3d-Text-for-Unity-in-the-Asset-Store-now

Hope that helps!

"bklooster" wrote:
If you want 3D spacial text you're probably going to want to pick up something like TTF text http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/141946-TTFText-1-1-Advanced-3d-Text-for-Unity-in-the-Asset-Store-now

Hope that helps!

Perfect... Exactly what I needed. Thanks!

I went with the TextBox asset, which is a good deal cheaper than TTFText and while it is pretty solid, it doesn't extrude fonts or anything like that.

I like it but still probably would have been more cost effective to just get NGUI.

Ngui works pretty well, I've got it up and running here with rift+hydra as both hud and context menu items.. I'd say it's worth going for it if you have the resources.

the free alternative might be bob's colliderbutton + textmesh http://pixelplacement.com/2012/10/17/collider-button/ and/or http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/class-TextMesh.html

What I did (with NGUI) was to set the UI camera to render to a texture instead of the framebuffer, and mapped this texture to a 3d plane kept as a child of the OVRCamera, the result is like seeing a transparent monitor floating in front of you.

I believe this is what TF2 also did for all their UI.

TTFText (mentioned already) and MegaFiers combined work quite well also. I'm able to get very nice looking, warped text. Unfortunately I don't have a Rift yet, so until the end of May I won't be able to really test what works and what doesn't. The wait is killing me ;_;

"Capyvara" wrote:
What I did (with NGUI) was to set the UI camera to render to a texture instead of the framebuffer, and mapped this texture to a 3d plane kept as a child of the OVRCamera, the result is like seeing a transparent monitor floating in front of you.

I believe this is what TF2 also did for all their UI.

Does this work well? I am planning on buying NGUI if it works for the rift.

Little tease of a work in progress, an extension to Textmesh Pro to do volumetric text.

You load a GPU representation of your original TTF, and thats it from the CPU side.
The rest is handled in a 2.0 shader. (an 8meg texture is good for about 8 thousand Chinese characters)

I think its a great solution for VR because the LOD is built in the shader, and that let you go as close as you want to the geometry, and also have a scene with pages upon pages of small 3d text that you can zoom in seamlessly.



side note, if you dont need extrusion Textmesh Pro is a pretty good solution for VR. UI & scene integration.
Mainly because it really let you get really up close and personal to your text and always look full res.