RTS Interlude #4: Improving the healthbars (Unity/C#)

Let’s digress for a while and leverage the power of shaders in our RTS game!

⬅️ Tutorial #49: Optimisation tips & tricks| TOC | Tutorial #50: Implementing a technology tree 1/3 ➡️

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In previous episodes of the series, we talked a bit about how to create healthbars for our units. In particular, we had some logic to create a UI element and “snap it” above the head of the unit.

However, this technique is pretty flawed and not very efficient because:

• the healthbars can quickly get strange offsets
• we have to manually reposition them on the screen whenever either the camera or the unit moves, plus when the camera zooms
• we are deleting and re-creating objects (the UI healthbars) each time we select or deselect our units

All these are bad and power-consuming… but there is a solution to improve all of this! So, today, let’s do a retake on our healthbars and see how we can use shaders to display them efficiently, robustly and easily :)

Using a simple quad to have the…