DOTS Visual Scripting 3rd experimental drop

I have this error.
Windows 10
Unity 2019.3.0a11
With the project roll a ball

 

please do NOT tell people to modify the

registry

key in manifest.json. you did this with the staging registry, and it caused a lot of unrelated problems.

upm has now scoped registries, use that instead

 

when adding component , how to I set its type ?

 

nevermind I just had trouble locating the + sign for adding a new field.

 

It really took me awhile to get started with figuring out what i needed to get a ball moving from a blank scene.

Maybe having events (On Start Entities, On Update Entities, etc) in the graph by default would be a better UX?

 

I don't know if this is affecting anyone else but I can't seem to download the latest version of either the ball demo or the visual scripting project. When clicking the download link on the google drive file page a new tab opens and nothing happens.

 

I was able to get the links to work when downloading from Microsoft Edge, I'm currently using Vivaldi (a Chromium based browser) and it doesn't appear to work in Vivaldi. The first 2 drops worked in Vivaldi. I don't have Google Chrome installed so I couldn't test there.
For anyone encountering the same trouble, you can try Edge or another browser engine and you might find success there.

 

One quick comparison i can make with the UI/UX so far is with Unity's own VFX graph

On boarding:



vs


(I know you said that you support a handful of events being in a fresh graph, so that's great)

Accessing individual values:



vs

(Also disabling a node is also a lot more of what you'd expect)


I personally feel like the VFX graph, even tho i'm no VFX artist, is a pretty good visual editing tool. Can't say i'm a fan of the vertical + horizontal form of editing that Unity seems to be going with...this seems to have a MUCH higher learning curve than the typical left to right systems most visual editors go with, but i digress. As far as this style of visual editing goes, the VFX graph made the idea of it a little more palatable with a lot of it's UI choices being well executed

I understand this is deeply experimental, but i just want to put out the concern just in case. I would love for more of these tools to feel unified, especially if one of them is already well liked. Seeing style changes going from the Shader graph, to the VFX graph, to the Scripting graph is pretty odd when it's all supposed to be official tools from the same company. And worse yet, going from the VFX graph to the Scripting graph, seeing the same exact editor but offered up two different levels of interaction can be kind of annoying.

Again, i feel the VFX graph is really nailing whatever this vertical + horizontal editing style is supposed to be, so I'd love to see more UI and UX shared between this and that.

Another thing is the Component creation:



This is fine, but i wondering if it's possible to just have this in the inspector?

I think I remember seeing the Tiny Mode having the ability to just edit the component from the inspector and i always though that was a solid visual solution. But having a whole separate window to do that seems a bit extra.

I've only had a chance to actually use it for a short while the other day, and after i figured out how to actually iterate over an entity, i was able to get something moving pretty quick. And i love the code viewer! I wonder if it'd be possible to sync what you're selecting in the editor to whats highlighted in the code viewer. Maybe more work than it's worth, but that'd be neat. One thing that's was killing me though: Is there a way to create a float3 from a couple float1s? I can't seem to find a "combine", or a float3 with individual accessible values.

 

Thanks for the response! The on-boarding draft seems great

And yeah, i was able to find the Events eventually after seeing that the code viewer wasn't updating no matter what i dragged into the editor. I thought i just needed to for loop over the entities. Then i started clicking around till i got to the Events then things started making sense

 

Dear Unity.
I had high hopes for your scripting language but it seems that you are trying to do a Bolt version.
If you are going to make one and it looks like Bolt or playmaker, why waste time doing it?.
In your roll a ball demo, just the amount of "code" to make the cube rotate is RIDICULOUS.
I hope when you release this, you won't make the same mistake as playmaker/Bolt and say that this tool is for artists and non programers. You don't need to lie.
When you announced it some year ago, or more, I made a comment on your video asking to not put your programmers working alone, to make them work with a person that didn't know how to program.
You answered that you were listening.
Obviously not.

 

DOTS visual scripting is not like bolt. Unity recommended people try bolt for monobehaviour, regular C# projects.

DOTS visual scripting is for ECS... and that creates a very specific way of working. Do you understand?

 

My main (and only, really) qualm with the UX right now is that the nodes take up a lot of space. One of the main handicaps of Visual Scripting in general is that a node will always take up a lot of room on the screen compared to just a few typed-out words, so my suggestion is that you could make the node headers thinner and give them some color. Blender's material editor is a good example of this. Each node ends up being a tad more compact, and it's also much faster to pick them out when they are placed in large groups or close together. To me it seems like headers are currently big because size is the only way to distinguish them from the rest of their node, but once color is added there is a lot more flexibility for different layouts and whatnot. It also looks better.

 

Have a look at playmaker, how simple the nodes look.

And I would also try to match shader graph and visual scripting visually, it would make it feel more like a universal design language is followed for nodes.

 

AFAIK visual scripting is using new UI called UIElements, where you can easily modify style sheets to fit your needs, so there should be no problem at making the nodes look how you want them to. There's a huge thread on changing the 2019.3 editor style, and people already do crazy stuff with style sheets in there.

 

Thats good to know, although would it not be nice to have look consistent even without any modifications?

 

Of course. Still it's a nice option for people that like to customize things, or won't agree to the final look of the nodes. With UI design it's hard to please everyone due to too many screen resolutions, DPIs, user sight problems, habits and preferences.

 

Totally agree that being able to customise it is the best, and also being able to custom color different nodes would also be a good way to quickly visually separate them.

 

With the Personal/Light Skin, some of the UI text colors and icons aren't calibrated to fit. As you can see it's hard to read the text and also hard to see the Add Field + Button.

This might already be known but pointing it out. Similar things happened with Shader Graph and VFX Graph as they are made with the Dark Skin so some things for the Light Skin gets missed. They were quickly fixed though.

 

Please, add support for usual c# scripts and visual scripting.

I would like to jump back and forth with visual scripting and code.

 

This is great. Can we expect the current build to work with project Tiny?

 

I’m coming from playmaker, are state machines ( FSMs) supported in this new unity visual scripting?

https://hutonggames.com/playmakerforum/index.php?topic=16086.0

I’m trying to see whether it will benefit me to use unity visual scripting to do the same as playmaker.

 

Could this be used to write Jobs?

 

Will Visual scripting logic be similar to UDK's Kismet ?

 

I'm confused, are you saying its currently capable of writing Jobs? If so the workflow for that isn't clear to me, maybe I could get clarification?

I am hoping to use it to do a bit of a 3 pass setup, where I prototype some jobs for a mesh modeling system, then move those jobs into pure code to do things too complicated for a visual interface. Then finally creating some higher level nodes to be used in more abstract visual scripts.

 

I learned Kismet a long time ago. It took a while to get to know it.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCWzG3zfTUPNyHEmG-yDRSy4sb8IhsKTL

 

It's really getting very good.

I hope to see more Drops in the future, as this feature will greatly help the community.

 

HI,
I understand that its not a final product but if it looks/works and feels like this now, Im sure it won't be very different from the final version. You may put a layer of paint on top but the inside, in my opinion, is being done the wrong way.
But hey, this is my opinion. I don't do code and so I tend to dislike everything that isn't intuitive. Just the example of the amount of "code" to make the cube rotate, is mind blowing.
I appreciate Unity´s efforts but I really think you could do better.
Probably this tool isn't for me. I guess I will have to wait. Maybe in Unity 3000.

 

I think what your looking for are highlevel nodes. They will come at some point when people make them.

Then you can have a high level node just for rotations

 

I notice you mentioned it in your fixes, but I ran into a lot of weird problems when renaming components/graphs. It would often result in errors that weren't being displayed anywhere. A few things I would like to see:

• Nodes like 'Add String' should have a button to 'add pin' to combine 3 or 4 strings together.
• Dragging components in a query from the Blackboard doesn't seem to work.

I got stuck after a while because I couldn't figure out how to instantiate a new entity without GameObjectCoverstionUtils.

 

Thanks for that, Eric! I tried using a GameObject but I got an error from a conversion utility in the graph (which failed to generate updated runtime code). Perhaps I just did something wrong, I'll try to repro again tonight and update this thread.

If it does end up working, there should probably be a way to make that conversion clear to the user, I would want to know that I can use a GameObject or Archetype instead of Entity and when I use those other type, it should reflect in the graph that a conversion is happening.

 

Out of curiosity, how is the edit workflow going to look like when ecs matures? Will something something eventually replace gameObjects for edit-time?