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:
You can also define an entity structure and render it, all in one same command in a .tsx file.
ui.tsx file:
index.ts file:
📔 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:
uiTransformuiBackgrounduiTextonClick
Like with HTML tags, you can define components as self-closing or nest one within another.
ui.tsx file:
index.ts file:
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.
Multiple UI modules
Your scene should have a single call to the ReactEcsRenderer.setUiRenderer() function. To define your UI via a series of separate modules in different files, you can pass an array to the renderer function listing each module. This is also useful when combining UI modules from a library (like the DCL UI toolkit library) with custom UI.:
Below is a more complete example:
ui.tsx file:
index.ts file:
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