Introduction

In this arti­cle we are going to see how to change the cur­sor image when the point­er hov­ers over a but­ton in Uni­ty. In addi­tion, a down­load pack­age is pro­vid­ed with the scripts, sprites and the scene with all the ele­ments already configured.

Download the Unity Package

Here you can down­load the Uni­ty Pack­age with the exam­ple on how to change the cur­sor image in Unity.

Default Cursor Settings in Unity

This is some­thing that can be done with­in a Start func­tion, but if our game or appli­ca­tion will have a cus­tom cur­sor, for exam­ple a cus­tom arrow, it is con­ve­nient to define it with­in the project para­me­ters, going to Edit > Project Set­tings, the win­dow shown in Fig­ure 3 is dis­played, there we can assign the default cur­sor Sprite, as well as its Hotspot coordinates.

Determining the Hotspot of our customized cursor

The hotspot of the cur­sor is the off­set vec­tor mea­sured from the upper left cor­ner of the Sprite and it indi­cates the point of the image where the tip of the cur­sor is con­sid­ered to be. The script that comes in the pack­age has fields defined to assign the Sprite of two cur­sors as well as the vec­tors of their respec­tive Hotspots, as seen in the inspec­tor in Fig­ure 4.

To deter­mine the Hotspots you have to enter the game mode and try dif­fer­ent val­ues until the cur­sor match­es, anoth­er way would be to know exact­ly how many pix­els hor­i­zon­tal­ly and ver­ti­cal­ly is the point of the cursor.

How to change the cursor IMAGE in Unity

To change the image shown by the cur­sor just exe­cute the instruc­tions shown in fig­ure 5, in lines 31 and 37, the SetCur­sor method inside the Cur­sor class, pass­ing as para­me­ter the sprite you want to show, the Vector2 with the posi­tion of the Hotspot and the cur­sor mode.

When to change the cursor image in Unity

In this par­tic­u­lar case we are inter­est­ed in con­stant­ly show­ing a default cur­sor until the point­er is posi­tioned over a but­ton, at that moment we want to show anoth­er dif­fer­ent cur­sor to give feed­back that the user can inter­act with that ele­ment. For this we need to be able to detect exact­ly when these events occur and for that I assign to each but­ton an "Event Trig­ger" com­po­nent and adding the "Point­er Enter" and "Point­er Exit" events.

To both events we assign the GameOb­ject that has the Script with the func­tions that we want to exe­cute (these func­tions must be defined as pub­lic) and then using the drop-down menu we choose the func­tions to exe­cute in each event.