Chapter 9. Creating GUIs Part 2 – Unity's New GUI System

Since the release of Unity 4.6, there are now some additional UI tools that have been added to make elements much more visual and easy to place, letting you know exactly what you're going to get.

Everything that we did in Chapter 2, Creating GUIs, is still quite relevant and works completely for now, and for the foreseeable future. In this chapter, we are going to see how to create some new elements using these new tools so that you can compare and contrast when it's a good idea to use one or the other.

The new UI is actually created inside our scene. We've learned how to create UI elements by calling code several times a frame during the OnGUI loop. The old UI system is still great to know, as it is still the backbone of the UI system, and will for the foreseeable future still be the means by which you can extend Unity's editor.

However, the new UI system uses a lot of the new things that were added when Unity added in their native 2D...