Glossary

The canonical vocabulary for this course. Terms are promoted here once they have been used correctly in an exercise; the Lesson 1 terms are provisional until the first panel is on screen.

Systems

uGUI (Unity UI): Unity’s GameObject-based runtime UI system: a Canvas, Rect Transforms and components such as Image and Button. Unity’s recommended runtime UI in Unity 6. Avoid: “the old UI”, “Canvas UI”

UI Toolkit: Unity’s newer UI system built on UXML and USS documents. Recommended for Editor tools; out of scope here.

Layout

Canvas: The root GameObject every UI element must live under. It decides render mode and, via the Canvas Scaler, how UI units map to screen pixels.

Rect Transform: The Transform used by UI elements. It has width and height as well as position, so resizing changes the rectangle rather than the scale.

Anchor: The point or region of the parent rectangle that a Rect Transform is pinned to. Together means a fixed size; apart means the element stretches with the parent.

Sprites

Nine-slice: Dividing a sprite into corners, edges and centre so it can be resized: corners fixed, edges stretched along one axis, centre along both. Avoid: “9-patch”, “scale-9”

Border: The pixel width of each side’s fixed region, set as L, R, T, B in the Sprite Editor. Measured, per side, as the rows or columns outside the panel’s repeating band.

Stretch-safe band: The block of pixel-identical rows and columns through a panel’s centre. Everything outside it is border; anything drawn inside it smears when sliced.

Sliced: The Image Type that draws a sprite with nine-slicing, stretching the edges and centre.

Tiled: The Image Type that draws a sprite with nine-slicing, repeating the edges and centre.

Point filtering: The Filter Mode that samples the nearest texture pixel and no neighbours, so pixel art stays blocky instead of blurring. Avoid: “nearest neighbour” (fine for the resize algorithm; the Unity field says Point)