Conner's Dev Blog

Dev Blog for RagBall Stamina UI:

Features:

• Stamina and Character portrait dynamically created on start based on TeamColor enum
• Created Event system for stamina that is emitted by players and listened to by the UI (also used for scoring and some other gamerules)
  • On event trigger, the corresponding systems get the notification and update their internal info accordingly, in context of Stamina UI, the UI updates the stamina Circle around the player portrait with the correct number of charges

Process:

• First thing that I needed to accomplish was the actual creation of the Canvas. I created it as a prefab and attached 4 empty transforms to it in the positions that the Player UI's would occupy.
• Next, I created the generic prefab for each players stamina ui that needs attached to the canvas. I got some art assets from our artists and hooked up the portrait and stamina Wheels into arrays with the associated index based on stamina amount.
• With the in game assets created, it was time to create the scripting logic.
  • First I had to refactor our stamina system as it was currently just an internal integer that required direct coupling for all of the other systems to reference. I decided that the best way to move forward was to privatize the players stamina value and send out an event every time it was changed.
  • With this change, I was able to remove our need for directly coupling players with external systems that referenced stamina which cut back on our need for update loops checking for changes.
  • Now that I had the event created, it was time for me to use it for the UI. I created a script attached to the main stamina canvas of the UI to hold references to the UI's being added and creates them into an array that is sorted by player index numbers for easy logic access. On creation of the stamina canvas, it gets the number of players and their colors and instantiates the new UI prefabs and gives them the locations based on the empty transforms from the canvas. It then subscribes to the events of each player and filters them into one internal function that accepts a player number and a stamina value as the argument. Because all of my values for the canvas are stored in arrays based on player number, the function can run for any valid player sent in and update the value accordingly.

Benefits:

• This style of event emission is extremely expandable as it allows any other script to use that event by simply subscribing to it and associating a function of its own without any need to update the player script.
• The use of events rather than direct coupling not only helps mitigate logic errors but it also helps cut back on update loops for checking if changes occur which can dramatically benefit the overall framerate and stability of the build (variation of affect is different based on scope).