Official Draggable overlays, custom toolbars, new Tool systems

Very cool upcoming feature.
A really small question/suggestion: wouldn't it be simpler to collapse/expand an overlay by double-clicking in its title? Instead of pressing C. Didn't test it, though. Just trying to imagine the daily workflow, ease of use etc.

Edit: typos.

 

Thanks a ton! -- I'll draw out a little diagram and point out what I'm talking about and link to the new thread from here when I get a few moments!


In addition to my previous post, I wanted to point out this thread (just to give a little bit of the "pain" of the issues with the current shortcut setup):

https://forum.unity.com/threads/ishortcuttoolcontext-can-i-use-it-pretty-please.717953/#post-6557197


My previous post outlines the reason we need an actual Shortcut Management (shortcut and workspace) hierarchy (in addition to) the Overlay Tooling systems -- and why these need to be worked on simultaneously.
That being said -- I get your position, so I'll post my idea with a little more visual context and show what I mean!



And as an aside:

I have been waiting a full year to make my Asset (NAVIGATION STUDIO) an actual "Studio" of tools -- so I am extremely excited to see this stuff finally being worked on.

Thank you guys for your hard work!

 

I think the key part of this is the "in the Title" portion of this comment.
A single click/drag everywhere else would be sufficient, I think.

 

Any update on when this might be available for preview?

 

Is any update available on this topic?

 

Also, is there any update on this subject (for "multi-window / multi-context" tools/shortcuts):

https://forum.unity.com/threads/ishortcuttoolcontext-can-i-use-it-pretty-please.717953/#post-7041313

 

Will it still be coming in 2021.2 alpha?

I can't wait to be able to test this in its final version in the editor

 

Sweet! Looking forward to it!

 

Considering that there will be code freeze for 2021.2 in week or two i wouldn't hope for overlays to be released in this version.

 

Speaking of faith though --

Have you guys figured out something about handling icons in Editor folders properly (rather than treating them as textures that clutter up a user's texture folders?)

Textures aren't the only problem, though @Catsoft-Studios had a great example of this sort of implementation for textures (i.e. convert them to binary data blobs), but it was clearly a (very convoluted) workaround -- especially for the average user.
The more imported assets (tools/extensions/etc), the bigger the problem.
That being said -- I think it would be better if we were able to simply have a new property on assets to indicate whether an asset (such as a Texture or any Serializable data, especially with a file extension) should be Editor-only. If these are not being included in builds, then they probably shouldn't be seen in-Editor either (at least without an "easy-to-access" toggle), especially upon importing them into a project. Perhaps a "show hidden" option on the browser windows that allow you to show hidden data/objects/files when browsing textures/assets/etc -- if desired?

"Show hidden Editor folder items" should also be a preference when browsing. A little checkmark on a right-click "popup" menu (or hamburger menu) should be a great option for this, in terms of discoverability.

 

Finally I guess the update is out

 

Tested this a bit and this is my feedback on the current status of overlays:
1. You can snap overlay to other overlay only if second is in vertical mode

You can't snap if he is in horizontal mode for some reason

Also you can't snap them if they are not docked to the side of window. Would be good to have snapping even if they are floating inside of scene view like this

2.Search field is not aligned to the center. There is like 4 pixels padding at the top and 8 at the bottom

3.Would be good to have ability to disable background when hovering orientation overlay

 

4. Dropdown menus spawned right above the buttons and you can't click anything. Only gizmo visibility menu has good positioning
Also you can't close menu if you click on arrow button second time. It's disabling menu for 1 frame and then appearing again
5. Would be nice to have ability to snap overlays to the center of window's edge
6. I need to click two times now when i want to change center/pivot or space. Not so good

7. Maybe make little arrow for quick collapsing like in maya?

 

Oh, i see, so there is only two containers for overlays on the left and right sides of the window? That's why they can't auto-layout horizontally in "floating mode". And if you docking some overlay to the top only then it will create horizontal container?

 

Now that Overlays are implemented I tried to implement what you said in this comment

"
// Note that when Overlays land this code could be implemented through a [CustomEditor(typeof(PlatformTool)]
// in order to show up in the Active Tool Options overlay."

However adding this to my overlay did not work? How can I make an overlay show when the component tool is selected?

Edit: To be clear, I have a custom overlay already that uses UI Toolkit to draw the overlay, returning a VisualElement, but now I want that overlay to be shown when a component tool is active.

 

@gabrielw_unity while I understand that "dropdowns can now host more options" is the goal, the interaction is now just too slow. This is a common issue with other softwares and one that Unity solved great. Don't throw that away, there are many ways to make this fast but still have a dropdown - there's already the UX metaphor of a "toggle with dropdown", and the button could just toggle back and forth between the last two selected options, with Local/Global being the default. The dropdown then allows to switch to something else.

This is needed so often in Unity that really, anyone working with Unity on a daily basis will immediately feel a persistent slowdown for their workflow.

 

That's a really good idea!

 

Have you all thought much about pie menus? Blender is a great reference for UX for this as it has quite a few space transform options, and uses pie menus heavily to make it a comfortable UX.

 

This scenario would be ideal
Assuming you right-click on the scene and open a circular menu with user-defined options, that would be great.

 

I dunno, I'm using too many softwares to remember shortcuts for any of them. I'm using Unity for over 10 years now and the only shortcuts I actually use are "F" and "Ctrl + S". Also I have to switch machines often, work on other user's machines temporarily to fix stuff, etc. which is another reason I don't like shortcuts

What happened to "we want to improve the experience for newcomers but not at the expense of experienced users"?

 

Another compromise: allow click and hold for selection in drop downs. So changing the setting is a click and short drag, rather than two clicks.

Blender does this for pie-menus, which is part of why they're so fast to use. Just click-swipe, click-swipe.

 

I'm not a huge fan of pie menus in general (dropdowns are my goto), but to allow the user to set/modify the style of menu he/she wants for particular overlays (i.e. by combining visual elements and behaviors quickly in UI Builder, for example), handling binding and pop-up, list, array-like behaviors for multifunctional controls. This all would be a nice compromise to Overlays that don't work well for certain users.
Think Blender's "snapping" and "magnet" buttons in its Scene view, for example. I can also imagine a click-to-toggle for the two most recent options, with a right-click (to dropdown the rest). Blender also has controls that "double-up" and really even "triple-up" functionality by grouping all the dropdown / click-to-toggle behaviors into a single control widget. Unity should have this flexible control style available as, say, multifunctional pop-up/dropdown/toggle abilities (capable of array-like usage, such as listboxes in the dropdown panels or even circular pie-menu-like arrays) in ALL of its interactable controls. These should be transferable to Overlays / Custom Toolbars.

Seriously -- study some of the unique UI Widgets in Blender's default in-scene view. Unity needs its "basic" controls to behave more flexibly (and allow for non-standard and complex, multi-functional, behavior as well). We need more than a "button" -- we need multipurpose buttons that can be toggles, dropdowns, pop-ups (persistent or not), etc., easy to use listboxes that work with these buttons/labels/panels, etc.

 

It looks like packages such as the VFX graph still use the old system, 'cause I don't see any scene controls when selecting the VFX game object in the scene making it unusable currently

Edit: I found that instead of being present in the scene view, they are present in the VFX graph editor, is this some sort of unintentional outcome of having the toolbars in context, or was this done intentionally, if it was then I don't really need to mention what problems would level designers are going to face interacting with them. (Having to open VFX editor for every VFX graph they select to have basic control over their playback during edit time)

 

Also, I get a lot of errors when interacting with property gizmos, When I edit any one of them and then undo, I get a lot InvalidOperation exceptions like these:


(Not sure if this is the right place to report them though )

 

Correct me if I'm wrong but it does look like the vfx property gizmos are using the new prefab handles api which was shown last year in the roadmap, but I haven't heard about it ever since

Is there a public api available now?

 

VFX graph will use overlays. This is already merged to master https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/4407

 

Just to clarify I marked the window that was supposed to be in scene view:

Although as mentioned above it's already fixed in an upcoming release

 

Did anyone see the new UE5 interface, it's exactly the kind of workspace unity needs for its scene view

Hotkeys to show panels and hide them, PEEK on the asset store does this pretty well, but I don't use it a lot because it's not part of Core unity and I can't use it on client projects, so don't wanna get spoiled by it

One more addition I could think of is to have some way to open toolbars using hotkeys instead of going through the menu to search for it (Maybe it will have a lot of conflict with other assets, but we have a shortcut manager to manage it in my opinion)

Also, a good question would be how will assets like PEEK adapt to these new toolbar changes?

 

I got PEEK on some sale or something. It was promising, until I started to test on 2020LTS. Quickly realized that it is more annoying than it is helpful and it is a long way to be stable.

I don't think Unity should copy either U5 or PEEK.

 

@gabrielw_unity
While checking out the new cloud system, I found this to be pretty annoying that the camera speed is capped at 2X for no particular reason, To navigate big worlds I have to rely on the Acceleration feature of the scene view camera or the simpleCameraController provided with HDRP template (for runtime camera).

It would be really useful if you could just remove the slider and instead use the Min attribute for it.

 

Hello dear developers.
I apologize in advance for my English.
For a long time I could not dare to write about this problem, but it ate my brain.
The unit has a toolbar that is static, you still have to try to add something to it. I have a small monitor, and every inch matters to me. I got out partially. For this purpose, I create a window with buttons and tools and add them on top. But each such window takes up a lot of space. I came across a very convenient arrangement of toolbars in the Neverwinter 2 editor.
Question:
1. Does this wake up in the Unity.
2. Can this be done without the source code of the engine?

Spoiler

Until that time, I got out by writing an extension (window with buttons), which did almost what I wanted, but not completely early on.

Spoiler

 

Will the Terrain Tools be part of that? I was thinking about toying around with your new Overlays because the way the Terrain Tools are handled now is way too many clicks.

With the 20+ new Terrain Tools I prefer to have them easily and instantly accessible instead of navigating through menu hierarchies. eg Noise requires 3 clicks, let alone then scrolling down to find the brush size.



That's way more compact and instantly accessible:



(minus the stacking which I hope Unity considers as well for adding themselves)

That being said, imo the Terrain Tools being in the Inspector is outdated. It should be an overlay or a dedicated Palette Window to be flexible and instantly usable.

You can take a look at a modification here:

https://forum.unity.com/threads/free-terrain-tools-3-mixer-open-source-github.1143332/

Better would be to also take out the layer palette, it takes away too much space. eg make it vertical grid instead of horizontal next to the common settings. Or even a dedicated draggable layer palette window.

Will we get something like that or at least a compact palette? I'd like to toy around just for fun, but then again if Unity considers something like that even toying around would be a waste of time. So it would be nice to have some feedback in advance. Thank you!

 

Will Unity provide a common Icon library for the Overlays?

 

Right now making icons to use for custom purposes is a true pain the butt. I think I ended up writing a script that exports the icon to bytes so that I can load the image with a script directly.

I finally had a "better" solution which was to build a scriptableobject instance and keep it with my package and have references to the icons stored on that. Still pretty gross. Would be nice if packaging and linking icons with a project was less of a hassle.

Also, just using unity's built in icons is a mess. I tend to find something like this https://github.com/halak/unity-editor-icons
and then randomly try icons that look like they might work for what I'm doing in the hopes that one of them will show up. Sometimes they do, sometimes not. Having a built in unity icon browser would be super nice.

 

Just wanted to add -- is this including full-on "Workspace" support and more contextual "Shortcut" settings for tools/overlays within the current "Workspace"?