Onscreen UI

Learn how to create a UI for players in your scene. This is useful, for example, to display game-related information.

You can build a UI for your scene, to be displayed in the screen's fixed 2D space, instead of in the 3D world space.

UI elements are only visible when the player is standing inside the scene's LAND parcels, as neighboring scenes might have their own UI to display. Parts of the UI can also be triggered to open when certain events occur in the world-space, for example if the player clicks on a specific place.

Build a UI by defining a structure of nested UIEntity objects in JSX. The syntax used for UIs is very similar to that of React (a very popular javascript-based library for building web UIs).

📔 Note: You can only define UI syntax in files that have a .tsx extension. .tsx files support everything that .ts files support, plus UI syntax. We recommend creating a ui.tsx file and defining your UI there. Remember to call your UI render method from index.ts with ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(yourUiMethodName), see example below.

A simple UI with static elements can look a lot like HTML, but when you add dynamic elements that respond to a change in state, you can do things that are a lot more powerful.

The default Decentraland explorer UI includes a chat widget, a map, and other elements. These UI elements are always displayed on the top layer, above any scene-specific UI. So if your scene has UI elements that occupy the same screen space as these, they will be occluded.

See UX guidelines for tips on how to design the look and feel of your UI.

When the player clicks the close UI button, on the bottom-right corner of the screen, all UI elements are hidden.

Render a UI

To display a UI in your scene, use the ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer() function, passing it a valid structure of entities, described in a .tsx file.

Each entity is defined as an HTML-like node, with properties for each of its components.

ui.tsx file:

import { UiEntity, ReactEcs } from '@dcl/sdk/react-ecs'
import { Color4 } from '@dcl/sdk/math'

export const uiMenu = () => (
  <UiEntity
    uiTransform={{
      width: 700,
      height: 400,
      margin: { top: '35px', left: '500px' },
    }}
    uiBackground={{ color: Color4.Red() }}
  />
)

index.ts file:

import { ReactEcsRenderer } from '@dcl/sdk/react-ecs'
import { uiMenu } from './ui'

export function main() {
    ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(uiMenu, { virtualWidth: 1920, virtualHeight: 1080 })
}

You can also define an entity structure and render it, all in one same command in a .tsx file.

ui.tsx file:

import ReactEcs, { ReactEcsRenderer, UiEntity } from '@dcl/sdk/react-ecs'
import { Color4 } from '@dcl/sdk/math'

export function setupUI() {
  ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(() => (
    <UiEntity
      uiTransform={{
        width: 700,
        height: 400,
        margin: { top: '35px', left: '500px' },
      }}
      uiBackground={{ color: Color4.Red() }}
    />
  ), { virtualWidth: 1920, virtualHeight: 1080 })
}

index.ts file:

import { setupUI } from './ui'

export function main() {
    setupUI()
}

📔 Note: All of your UI elements need to be nested into the same structure, and have one single parent at the root of the structure. You can only call ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer() once in the scene.

UI Entities

Each element in the UI must be defined as a separate UiEntity, wether it's an image, text, background, an invisible alignment box, etc. Just like in the scene's 3D space, each UiEntity has its own components to give it a position, color, etc.

The React-like syntax allows you to specify each component as a property within the UiEntity, this makes the code shorter and more readable.

The components used in a UiEntity are different from those used in regular entities. You cannot apply a UI component to a regular entity, nor a regular component to a UI entity.

The following components are available to use in a UiEntity:

• uiTransform

• uiBackground

• uiText

• onClick

Like with HTML tags, you can define components as self-closing or nest one within another.

ui.tsx file:

import ReactEcs, { ReactEcsRenderer, UiEntity } from '@dcl/sdk/react-ecs'
import { Color4 } from '@dcl/sdk/math'

export const uiMenu = () => (
  // parent entity
  <UiEntity
    uiTransform={{
      width: 200,
      height: 200,
      margin: { top: '250px', left: '500px' },
    }}
    uiBackground={{ color: Color4.Blue() }}
  >
    // self-closing child entity
    <UiEntity
      uiTransform={{
        width: 400,
        height: 400,
        margin: { top: '35px', left: '500px' },
      }}
      uiText={{ value: `Hello world!`, fontSize: 40 }}
    />
    // closing statement for the parent entity
  </UiEntity>
)

index.ts file:

import { ReactEcsRenderer } from '@dcl/sdk/react-ecs'
import { uiMenu } from './ui'

export function main() {
    ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(uiMenu, { virtualWidth: 1920, virtualHeight: 1080 })
}

A definition of a UI module can only have one parent-level entity. You can define as many other entities as you want, but they must all fit inside a structure with one single parent at the top.

Screen Virtual Scale

Set a vitual width and height for the UI. This is encouraged to make sure your UI looks the same on different screen sizes, regardless of the actual screen size in pixels.

export function setupUi() {
    ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(uiComponent, { virtualWidth: 1920, virtualHeight: 1080 })
}

If you set a virtual width to 1920, and a virtual height to 1080, the UI will be scaled to fit the screen size. If the screen is 1920x1080, the UI will be displayed at the same size as the virtual size. If the screen is larger or smaller, any pixel values will be scaled to fit the virtual size. For example, if the screen is 3840x2160, an item that is defined as 100 pixels in width will be displayed over 200 actual pixels.

The actual calculation for the Ui Scale Factor that gets multiplied on pixel values is Math.min(realWidth / virtualWidth, realHeight / virtualHeight)

Multiple UI modules

If your scene contains multiple systems or modules that each define their own UI, you can render each UI module with ReactEcsRenderer.addUiRenderer(). This is especially useful when working on a complex scene with multiple UI components, or when defining UIs for a smart item, which should be usable independent of what's in the code of the rest of the scene.

The ReactEcsRenderer.addUiRenderer() function requires that you provide an entity as the owner of the UI. This can be any entity, even a dummy entity created only to be used as the owner of the UI.

export function setupUi() {

    // Create a dummy entity to be the owner of the UI
    const dummyEntity = engine.addEntity()

    // Define the UI module as a function that returns an array of UI modules
    const uiComponent = () => [
      // Function returning a UI module,
      // Function returning a UI module
      // ...
    ]

    // Render the UI module with the dummy entity as the owner
    ReactEcsRenderer.addUiRenderer(dummyEntity, uiComponent)
}

This snippet can exist independently of any other UI code in the scene. The rest of the scene might include a ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(), or none at all, and the UI will still be rendered.

An addUiRenderer() call can also include a virtual width and height, just like setUiRenderer(). However, if the scene has a setUiRenderer() call that also defines a virtual width and height, the virtual width and height of the addUiRenderer() call will be ignored.

ReactEcsRenderer.addUiRenderer(dummyEntity, uiComponent, { virtualWidth: 1920, virtualHeight: 1080 })

That UI can be removed with ReactEcsRenderer.removeUiRenderer(dummyEntity) , also If the entity that owns the UI is destroyed, the UI will be removed too. If ReactEcsRenderer.addUiRenderer() is called again for the same entity but with a different UiRenderer, the previous one is cleaned up and the new one replaces it.

Sharing a single setUiRenderer statement

Instead of calling ReactEcsRenderer.addUiRenderer() for each UI module, you can call ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer() once with an array of UI modules, that can live in different files.

const uiComponent = () => [
  // Function returning a UI module,
  // Function returning a UI module
  // ...
]

ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer(uiComponent, { virtualWidth: 1920, virtualHeight: 1080 })

Below is a more complete example:

ui.tsx file:

export function UIModule1() {
  return (
    <UiEntity
      uiTransform={{
        flexDirection: 'column',
        alignItems: 'center',
        justifyContent: 'space-between',
        positionType: 'absolute',
        position: { right: '3%', bottom: '3%' },
      }}
    >
      <Label value="Hello World!" fontSize={18} textAlign="middle-center" />
    </UiEntity>
  )
}

export function UIModule2() {
  return (
    <UiEntity
      uiTransform={{
        flexDirection: 'column',
        alignItems: 'center',
        justifyContent: 'space-between',
        positionType: 'absolute',
        position: { right: '3%', top: '3%' },
      }}
    >
      <Label
        value="Here's some more UI!"
        fontSize={18}
        textAlign="middle-center"
      />
    </UiEntity>
  )
}

index.ts file:

import { ReactEcsRenderer } from '@dcl/sdk/react-ecs'
import { UIModule1, UIModule2 } from './ui'

export function main() {
    ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer([
      UIModule1(),
      UIModule2(),
      // ...
      // The line below is to use the DCL UI Toolkit library
      // https://github.com/decentraland-scenes/dcl-ui-toolkit
      ui.render(),
    ], { virtualWidth: 1920, virtualHeight: 1080 })
}