Unity new Input System : Note on UI Mobile Controls (Part IX)

4 min readJan 2, 2022

In this lecture we see how to use new Input System in mobile devices.
What we talk about is On Screen Control
Here’s a reference
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.inputsystem@0.9/manual/OnScreen.html

Let’s set up a scene for example.
We have a “plane” and a cube, the cube is the player and we want to move it with the joystick.
Super easy example.

Now, in order to create a joystick without have it, we need OnScreenGui. In few words, a UI image.

After create it, change source image to “knob”, so we have a circle

To change image just click here

And position it in the lower left corner

Now rename it to Joystick and add a new component :
On Screen Stick

Before moving on, the Movement Range determine how much we can pull the stick in any direction, and the Control Path can be map to in Assets that we have in our game.

In this case we choose joystick and stick.

If we try to use it in Play mode it seems ok, obviously nothing can be move yet but the stick seems fine.

But to use it correctly, we need to go i EventSystem, and click on Replace With InputSystemUI

Now that we have the right component, we need to implement it so can we move our Player!

And it works very similar to how we’ve used it so far :

I create an Input Actions, open it and create a Player, and a Movement.
Movement is not a button but it’s a Vector2 because in the documentation we know this is a Vector2

Now, watch out to this passage :
when we use a Vector2 we do this step and everything works fine

But in this case, we have to use another option.
Because the movement is determine by the Joystick, we pass in directly the stick thanks to “usages” option