A few years ago I decided to fix my biggest gripe with Unity’s InputSystem: there is no intuitive and fuss-free way of determining which UI, character controller, popup, etc. should be receiving inputs at any given time.
Sure, the Action Maps are a great baseline for handling this since they let you assign a set of inputs to each given system; but you still have to make sure to enable and disable them at the correct moment. This can be easy in a small project, but when you have dozens of systems and UIs to contend with; it can get kind of messy.
So I started working on a system that sort of “automatically” handles all the mess for me and handles the complexity on its own.
After a few years of working on it when I felt like it in my spare time, I’m officially taking InputLayers out of beta:
You can get InputLayers for free on the asset store.
What is InputLayers?
The short version is that it’s a system that lets you assign input actions to layers that “stack” priority. So when your popup comes up on screen, its layer is added to the top of the stack; and as long as no other layer takes its place, only inputs from that layer will be taken into account.
There’s a bit more depth to all this, with layer priorities that prevent less “important” systems from taking over higher priority ones; but at its core; it basically lets you set things up using a single configuration window; and then never have to worry about if your character will keep moving when your main menu is open, or whatever other similar conflict you can imagine.
Video overview
I go over the core idea in a little bit more detail in this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bXEuzpbGlCI
Sample scenes
I’ve included a few sample scenes, though their code is a bit of a mess at the moment (I’ll be updating them in the next few days); but if you can get past the mediocre UI code, they cover most of the basic use cases.
Documentation
I’ve set up the documentation over on GitHub for ease of access; and so that people can post issues they may encounter easily.
