This week I worked on an Item Tool Tip UI component and also researched an inventory system for unity. The Item tool tip is designed to help the user understand more about the object they are currently looking at. The Inventory System research is for the user to store tools and components and will be an easy way for manually selecting items without having to ask GUS.
Item Tool Tip
The item tool tip is an extremely important UI component. It should help the user whenever they are looking for more detail. I had previously drew some sketches of how this UI would look and also made some concept art in Photoshop. Making the tool tip UI was not too difficult. I started with a canvas to be drawn in the world space, added my backing image from my concept in Photoshop and then added the text and image elements. I created a script that would allow the team to easily change elements from Unity's inspector. I then made it into a prefab and pushed it to the project.
Inventory System Research
The inventory system is a big task and so it was broken into two main tasks:
- Research
- Implementation
This week I was looking at researching how to implement the inventory system. I talked with the team to clarify that it was more of an inventory lookup which the user would search for a tool or component and then be able to select it and duplicate it into the world. I planned to use the Microsoft Mixed Reality collections set to display all the components/tools around the user. These would be game objects of an image, text and ID. Once the user selects an object its ID is used in a list to find the actual game object to duplicate. This is how inventory systems work in unity from tutorials online in terms of an id and then second lookup table. For tools we will check if it is already in the world, remove it if it is and then create another instance of it in front of the player.
Issues
This week I felt I had an overestimated task. The inventory system research seemed like a daunting task but after starting it I realized it would not be too difficult. It was estimated at 6 hours to complete however I had it finished after ~2.5 hours of research. Another issue was my interactive buttons proved not to work within the AR kit and I now have to fix them for our next sprint.