Unciv/docs/Developers/UI-development.md

UI Development

Unciv is backed by GDX's scene2d for the UI, so check out their official documentation for more info about that.

We mainly use the Table class of scene2d, because it offers nice flexibility in laying out all the user interface.

The FasterUIDevelopment class

This class is basically just a small helper GDX application to help develop UI components faster.

It sets up the very basics of Unciv, so that you can then show one single UI component instantly. This gives you much faster response times for when you change something, so that you can immediately see the changes you made, without having to restart the game, load a bunch of stuff and navigate to where your UI component would actually be.

To use it, you change the DevElement class within the FasterUIDevelopment.kt file so that the actor field is set to the UI element you want to develop. A very basic usage is there by default, just showing a label, but you can put any UI element there instead.

class DevElement(
    val screen: UIDevScreen
) {
    lateinit var actor: Actor
    fun createDevElement() {
        actor = "This could be your UI element in development!".toLabel()
    }

    fun afterAdd() {
    }
}

You can then simply run the main method of FasterUIDevelopment to show your UI element.