Dev Diary 10: UI Woes
Currently, the status of Lab 77 is as follows:
97 of 109 bugs have been squashed. Of the remaining 12, four require further work and eight are awaiting further testing or integration.
Controller support is still being worked on
Artwork, Music, sound design, scripting and voice acting work is all in progress.
Last time I wrote one of these I had thought that my implementation of a menu navigation system was near its completion. However, over the course of the last two weeks I was proven very wrong. While most of the menu navigation works, the settings menu has proven very problematic and it seems to me that the different UI Interaction Components are too much of an issue to deal with. In short, the toggles isOn property can not be changed in code, and while up to version 2019.3 seems to have had a SetIsOnWithoutNotify() method, 2021.3 does not according to the documentation. And I am on version 2021.3. And I am not changing the version now.
While I have not been able to fully determine why the dropdowns are not working as expected, they are TextMeshPro dropdowns and not legacy ones. This leads me to believe that there is some different functionality for them that does not fall enough in line with the other Interaction Components. And at this point I don't think it is worth it to spend more time on this.
The sliders however work fine...
As wrangling the native Interaction Components seems not to work as I had expected, I am now going to re-design the settings menu to use buttons only. It is quite possible that there is a solution to this problem, however I have not been able to find it and I have smashed my head against the wall too much with this problem to keep going. While I am annoyed that I have to re-do this menu, I think this will allow for much easier keyboard interaction without sacrificing ease of use when using a mouse. Additionally it will allow for more uniformity in the design.
Even though I have been mainly working on the UI issues, I have also taken slight breaks to implement other things such as the new in-chamber pipes that provide power for the end button, and helpfully show the way as well.
Additionally I improved the in-game UI textboxes, to make sure they are easier to read.
In addition to Lab 77, "The Story of E. Rose" is still not finished. However, progress has been made and I am hoping to be able to have it done sometime this month or April at the latest. When it is done I will upload it to itch.io where I am hoping to upload other smaller projects in the future, each project being priced at $4 or less. This is in line with what I wrote about the Special Supporter tier on Patreon (https://patreon.com/DistilledProductionsLimited) last time.
That is all for this dev diary, more to come in two weeks.
Thank you for reading.
- Olav