I have to admit that since the creation of the Buttons object in Glitch Garden I have disliked the implementation in the course. Everything was dull and hard to customize. After a few days of playing around with it I ended up making a separate canvas just for the “Stars Text” and put it over the top of the buttons background to work around it. It seems to all have stemmed from using the Quad background and trying to show canvas like things without a canvas.
Now that we’re adding a canvas to the buttons, these things are just getting worse. Everything is hard to manage and still customization is severely limited.
After reading through some of the issues presented in the questions I was wondering why Nina was telling people to use image instead of sprite renderer, so I gave it a shot.
I rebuilt the whole Buttons object using image components, making the Buttons parent object a canvas as Rick did in this lecture (174 Add Star Cost to Button). Now, after all is done, I’m very satisfied with the result. I removed the extra canvas for the Stars Text and put it back into the Buttons object. I had to rewrite the code pointing to sprite renderers and tell it to use images, instead. After that everything is much better. The text is easy to manage and vibrant and much more easily customizable (because it’s not being obscured by the buttons background). We no longer have to mess with the Z position of the buttons object in order to force it to be out in the front of the game background. The buttons background color and alpha can be adjusted in many more ways and still look good.
I am sure that some of the techniques used were just for the sake of teaching and may have worked a little better in the version of Unity at the time (I’m using 2019.4 lts), but I can’t move on without bringing up how it’s currently so underwhelmingly awful and I would suggest having something added to the curriculum to address this, maybe a quick section on rebuilding the buttons object, ground up, with using it as a canvas in mind. It could showcase how decisions made can need to be changed because of certain added aspects. Based on all the comments and questions on this specific part of the course, I gather that many people feel the same way.