Making Responsive UI in Godot

January 17, 2025

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With gamers utilizing completely different display screen sizes on varied gadgets, a responsive Person Interface (UI) is important for recreation growth. A well-crafted responsive UI ensures your recreation seems and works completely on any display screen, protecting gamers engaged and glad. Godot Engine gives a variety of settings and nodes that make creating responsive UIs in your recreation simple.

On this tutorial, you’ll discover ways to use these settings and nodes to create responsive UIs. Right here’s what you’ll study:

Key ideas of making a responsive UI.
Ideas of reference decision and side ratio.

You’ll additionally discover ways to use:

The CanvasLayer node.
Anchor to place the nodes.
The NinePatchRect node for backgrounds.
GridContainer to structure kids nodes.
And find out how to swap between full-screen and windowed modes.

By the tip of this tutorial, you’ll make the starter challenge’s UI responsive and add performance to toggle between fullscreen and windowed modes.

Getting Began

This tutorial makes use of the newest model of Godot 4. You’ll be able to obtain it at Godot’s web site.

Obtain the tutorial supplies by clicking Obtain supplies on the prime or backside of the tutorial. Then, extract the zip file to a location of your selection.

There are two initiatives within the supplies:

Starter: This challenge incorporates UIs with none responsive dealing with. You’ll convert them to responsive UIs later.
Remaining: The ultimate model of the responsive UI, which you’ll run and play straight.

As well as, this tutorial requires you to have primary data of Godot Engine and GDScript. The next tutorials can get you on top of things:

File Overview

Import and open the starter challenge in Godot Challenge Supervisor. Or, double-click challenge.godot within the starter folder.

Have a look within the FileSystem dock and observe the folders and recordsdata inside:

scenes: The folder that holds the scene recordsdata.
- game_map.tscn: A tile-based recreation map.
- participant.tscn: The Participant character.
- main_scene.tscn: The Major scene.
scripts: The scripts connected to the above scenes.
- camera_follow.gd: A Camera2D script. It makes the digicam comply with the Participant node.
- participant.gd: The script that helps you management the Participant character.
- main_scene.tscn: The script that helps the primary scene.
sprites: The folder containing the graphics.

Major Scene

Time to check out the Major scene!
Double-click primary/scene.tscn within the FileSystem dock to open the Major scene and swap to a 2D display screen. You’ll see this:

Subsequent, run the scene by urgent F5. As you’ll be able to see, the sport has a easy interface. You’ll be able to management the participant with the arrow keys to stroll on the map.

The starter model doesn’t help responsive dealing with, and you could discover some UI issues if you resize the window.

You’re aim is to show this easy UI right into a responsive one that appears good on all window resolutions.

Why Construct Responsive UI

Responsive UI is essential as a result of gamers might have completely different gadgets with completely different display screen resolutions.

Listed here are some frequent display screen resolutions on completely different platforms:

Desktop: 1920×1080, 1366×768, 1280×1024, 1024×768
Cellular: 667×375, 736×414, 800×360, 844×390
Pill: 2732×2048, 1024×768, 601×962

Poorly managed UI responsiveness might trigger points for gamers and can harm their play expertise.

The next are the issues that will come up with a poorly responsive UI:

UI parts might seem too small.
UI parts are positioned off the display screen.
UI parts are unfilled or overlapping.

Responsive UI goals for a constant, fulfilling expertise on all screens.

Primary Data of Person Interface Design

Earlier than you construct a responsive UI, it’s essential to study a little bit about UI Design.

Subsequent, you’ll find out about design decision, side ratio, and orientation.

Design Decision

When designing a consumer interface, think about putting containers on a canvas.

These containers are the UI parts, like labels and buttons. The canvas is your recreation display screen. Design decision refers back to the goal dimensions of the canvas, which helps decide the width and top of UI parts to fulfill the design necessities.

Facet Ratio

Facet ratio is one other essential think about UI design. It’s calculated by dividing the width of the display screen by its top. By evaluating the side ratios of your design and the display screen, you’ll know if the display screen is wider, narrower, or the identical.

Right here’s a comparability of varied display screen sizes and design resolutions:

Orientation

The final essential issue is orientation.

There are two sorts of orientation:

Portrait: The display screen width is shorter than the display screen top.
Panorama: The display screen width is longer than the display screen top.

Selecting the right orientation within the early growth part is essential. It dramatically impacts the consumer interface design. For instance, desktop-first video games usually use panorama orientation, whereas it’s frequent for mobile-first video games to make use of portrait orientation.

Understanding the Strategies For Dealing with the Responsive UI

There’s two frequent approaches to creating responsive UI.

In method one, you retain the side ratio and scale all UI parts to suit the brand new decision. Any remaining areas that don’t match the display screen gained’t be rendered and can present as a black background.

In method two, you modify the side ratio and scale to suit the display screen through the use of the display screen’s side ratio. On this method, you’ll want to deal with two situations:

Outline the alignment of UI parts.
Deal with the distortion of the graphical UI parts.

Subsequent, you’ll discover ways to apply these two approaches in Godot.

First Method: Hold Facet-Ratio

First, you’ll study the “preserve the side ratio” method to dealing with responsive UI.

Open the Challenge Settings and choose the Show > Window setting. Then, go to the Stretch part, set the Mode property to canvas_items and set the Facet property to preserve as its default setting.