New Editor Theme

Here's a pretty simple improvement you could make to the new theme. One pet peeve of mine has been the play button; I've never liked the fact that you press the play button icon again to exit play mode. It just doesn't feel intuitive or correct.



Now I guess this was originally meant to imitate how physical buttons function, but as far as I know, all physical play buttons are not toggle-able and always accompanied by a separate stop button. Pressing a depressed button doesn't make any sense to me anyway. Isn't that physically impossible?

In any case, this new flat theme has removed any rationale the original design may have had, since we're not imitating physical elements anymore. The now slightly shaded flat button is almost indistinguishable from it's normal state. Making the state change almost unnoticeable.



Now you could fix this by adding some depth to the button again but I've always thought that the play icon should actually change into a stop icon when in play mode to make it's changed functionality much more obvious.



I think this tiny change would be a vast improvement since it makes the play state and buttons changed purpose much more obvious. This should also help remind users they're in play mode.

 

We do this with Koreographer. It is indeed trivial to do and makes things very clear. I think it would be a welcome addition to the main Editor's UI.

 

I really enjoy the flat UI over the old UI because I didn't enjoy any of the gradients on the old UI. However, I've always been bothered about the fact that the dark UI is not available to users on the personal edition of unity. You shouldn't be monetising this basic feature for a fee of £35 a month, 15,000 people have voted for this change and I would really like to know if you are taking this into consideration. Also, you mentioned that one of the reasons of updating the UI was to improve usability, and I think enabling the dark theme for everyone would be a great decision as many people may suffer from the light theme including me.

 

For the record, I agree with you. That said, please refer to this post in this very thread.

Let's try to keep the conversation targeted at feedback regarding the New Theme™ before the Unity devs stop paying any attention because things "devolved into another screed against paying for Dark Mode."

 

My biggest dislike is that the contrast of the interface has gone up. The text and icons are brighter, while the background is a tad darker (due to missing highlights and dimensionality) and that means it's harder on the eye.

It's a lot harder to see which one of two (out of focus) tabs is selected. Tab background is darker, has no dimensionality, text is brighter - almost impossible to see at a glance, where it was really obvious in the old UI

Please improve the spacing around all the text, it seems this has gone out the window. Flat UI can work, but ONLY (and I can't emphasize this enough) only by working with text and spacing. For example, look at the Project pane with the Create dropdown underneath - it's a sad mess with no proper form or shape.

I like most of the new icons (just wish they were a tad darker) with one big exception: the ScriptableObject icon is extremely hard on the eyes, especially at a small size. Look at a folder full of ScriptableObjects in One Column Layout and tell me you don't feel like deleting them immediately.

 

One more thing: If you're changing size/padding/margin of default elments (checkboxes, buttons, etc.) as well as the font, be aware that you will break the look of pretty much every Editor Extension that's currently out there. Are you sure you want to do that?

 

I agree, giving the editor any color tint will really mess with artists' vision when adjusting colors. A blue tint will make them think neutral is bluer in their scene, so a final build will reflect the editor tint.

 

If we could theme our editor however we want that would be nice.

 

So we could change the colours? and the padding / margins like on a website ?

 

I loved the design mockup that was shown at Unite Berlin 2018:



I'm abstaining from voting in this poll because honestly it just looks like you removed a bunch of gradients and called it a day, I don't like either design. Maybe I'm misinterpreting something here and this is just some kind of intermediate redesign before the full redesign some years down the line. If that's not the case, I'm not impressed.

 

yes! the mockup from Unite Berlin looks good, because there is order, there is good contrast and there is good spacing around text and everything. what's there in the alpha right now is worse than what we had before.

 

Yes, the current redesign is a transitional step to get the whole editor up and running on the New UI system (UI Elements). After that, we will get the mockup version or some form of it.

 

Unlock dark theme and theming features for everyone. White theme hurts my eyes. You think i must pay for dark theme in order to save my eye?

If you want a good example of UI theme just watch how Unreal Engine do that.

 

It's actually very dated and with old school icons, or do you refer to the colours? If you can specify what you mean it can be useful.

 

I was able to migrate Dialogical to the new look. There were a few strange things I encountered:

• In places where I instantiated GUIStyle from code I couldn't set the element height. Getting the style from skin from the front-end made it work.
• The fonts are rendered differently. The same specified Font with the same specified size from the previous version looks 30% bigger. This will cause severe breaking changes in both Asset Store Assets and Internal Custom Editors for no good reason. The rendering sizes of all the fonts with specified size should look the same as in the old version.
• Changing the font size is not enough, the fonts all look blurry. I was trying to adjust the font to be the same size, but then it just doesn't look good with the introduced blurriness. Some classic fonts like Arial are pretty unusable, because they don't look good at any font size, and the inflation in size makes it hard to find the balance between the blurriness and the size.

Now for the quality of the UI.

It's pretty bad. It is not unbearable for me, but it is very straining. The Roboto font looks horrible on Windows. Flat designs are horrible, they lack visual separation, contrast and coherency. The greys are just thrown around seemingly at random, they don't look good when placed together. Buttons don't look like buttons, they look like blobs. They look even worse when hovered. The lack of folder colors and smudgy flat icons make the whole editor look drab, grey, dim and depressing. The project hierarchy looks way too dark, with dark folders and too dark letters. The elements take more vertical space, but why? We bought huge ass monitors to have more information on the screen, which you take away by employing the wasted whitespace trend.

The letter spacing in Windows Roboto is too small. Like here, it looks like at h3. It is straining and hard to read.

I know Unity pushes Macs for whatever crazy reason, but you have shown us here that you didn't do any testing on Windows before opening this to the public. Having the more passionate and available users find all the obvious things that are broken and enumerate them here is a pretty lame way to use people's time. You should be doing the testing to a sensible degree before asking for feedback. I don't know what methodology this is, but certainly isn't agile or whatever. The font blurriness would have been discovered by anyone with a single look, and it is so pronounced when Roboto is bold (which you did when you unfortunately separated Assets and Packages), the lack of separation and extreme blurriness in the Assets label should have been alarming.

Roboto also lacks vertical separation. If you click any script you will find it very hard to read.

See how the parens hit each other in the 2 vertically aligned ifs? That's a bug.

If you wanted to ask for feedback on the concept, it could have been done on concept images, without re-implementing CSS first and months of work. Now who is going to scrap this downgrade after such time investment? It will be pushed at users.

There are 2 things in this whole story that should be really concerning:
1. Inability to fix the blurry fonts on Windows
If you think this can get fixed in some update you may be right... or maybe not. It has been more than a month since they introduced this version, and the most important and most complained about thing didn't get fixed. When they introduced the Unity Hub or whatever it was very blurry on windows. Then they fixed it to be a bit less blurry, but it is blurry to this day. The current version of Unity Editor looks perfectly non-blurry, but it is about to become so.
Take a look (Windows 7, Unity Projects selector screen):


If you trace your eyes over the border of the letters you will see they look fuzzy even without zooming. Take a look at the top of e and c for example, or the jagged steps in the N.

2. The propensity to push unwanted changes on users
First the forum, then the Asset store downgrade, then this. It's all the same story, flat vs not, oversized elements, common use cases looking worse, change for changes sake, poor visual coherency. We've been through this before. But this is not the end of it. They are planning to create another "upgrade" with more wasted whitespace, introduced at Unite Berlin. It is so drab, black and flat that it looks like an obituary.

Please don't do this to your users.

 

Do these builds show up in the Unity Hub list now that it supports Alpha? Or is it only the mainline alpha builds that are supported at present?

 

@jonathans42
New fonts look pretty bad on Win 10, especially “M” and “W”.

 

It went up on YouTube today:

 

comparing 2019.1.0a4 (old) vs 2019.1.0a7 (new) images:
https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/juxt...html?uid=942418d0-e232-11e8-9dba-0edaf8f81e27


from latest build
- looks better than previous build..
- component checkbox marker bit too light.. hard to see
- that white tip bubble, unnecessary big (old was smaller too)
- in existing ui, small text still much clearer to read
- console window looks messy, huge font?, big icons and using different styles (notification has outline others dont)

console old vs new:

 

I try to track what has been said already.
But main concern about new UI, is its flat look. It takes away valuable information. I.e. where are buttons.

Dark theme looks good. But is that to be option for Unity free version?

To be hones, I don't think there is much need to change with current UI. Rather than option for color theme change. Which is purposely not available to all?

If I would even spent resources looking for UI redesign, I would go for HTML5.
Then people could adapt UI to their needs, with few small adjustments.

 

Hi,

A lot of what I am going to list has been said already, but I feel it's important as Unity is my main Interface all day, I love the product and it's an integral part of my job and I am very worried about what I am seeing unfortunately...

- First realize that there are many absolutely amazing apps UI/UX out here: check out https://frame.io/ or https://macpaw.com/ and so many more to understand this is your chance to do something big on that front.

- You need to have proper designers and UI/UX artists to create a mock up, and then implementing it exactly as it was designed down to the last pixel, the other way around is a waste of time and money and will create frustration for all involved parties. What I am looking at with this unity build is totally 'developers art' and it's not good... not that I can do better myself, but I do recognize I can not do better. Many times, you need to let the pros do their jobs.

- Spend time to create a flexible editor UI so that third parties can create a complete Editor Skin, that's the only goal that make sense. Look at the asset store success story, let publishers provide the goods, give them the platform to enable us. Let them express themselves across the board.

On the specifics:
- the contrast is upsetting (to stay polite) on both light and dark skin making it very difficult and tiring for the eyes,
- the boundaries are not clear and create a sense of emptiness and you are lost in the layouts.
- bad alignments almost everywhere...
- Services tab and Asset store needs to be in sync with this new skin, why keep it separate, it makes it very unprofessional and just stitched together.

In short: bring a proper html engine to run the whole Editor interface, it has to be able to render a regular website page and Unity editor would expose itself to javascript. You are half way with the Asset store, just make the jump.

I am surprised that no attention is paid to the lack of flexibility in the toolbars. I mean, most IDE provides its users with a customization set of toolbars... it's time to align the Unity Editor with modern requirements and expectation, and that does not mean just going for a flat UI... far from it. You should actually be at the forefront and create the new standard...

Bye,

Jean

 

Maybe someone already has pointed out, but I do just realized, that new flat dark theme looks like halve baked copy of VS dark theme.

 

Great, thank you so much! May I suggest an option "Enable font anti-aliasing" as well? (at our own risk, of course)

Similar example from Blender:

 

Ah, that's a good idea! I'll take the risk, if it's available in the Personal edition.

I have a personal request too. You know that we can reorganise the Hierarchy window content however we want; the Project window on the other hand is strictly alphabetical order designed; could we get the possibility to rearrange its content too, the same we do for the hierarchy window?

 

Very nice that font selection option!

 

Separate question:
Can you allow an option for the Layers popup, to have its own window panel.
so I can dock it where I want?

Thanks

 

That has been requested in the "Unity Feedback" thread, but it is something that is absolute requirement !
Not to speak that the whole hierarchy window need to be improved. In editor layers for hierarchy window is something that will improve editor experience for designers a lot, and honestly i was hoping to see it improved up until now !

As i understand there are no any plans currently for improving hierarchy window in terms of usability and UI !?

 

People requested a while back access to this ( 2014 )

https://forum.unity.com/threads/c-access-to-the-layers-visibility-and-lock.262278/

So that we could make our own window, but the window is locked and there is no API.

If you can flag it to the team that would be appreciated!
Thanks!!

 

Tools.visibleLayers
Tools.lockedLayers

 

Its read only as far as I know.

Did anyone successfully make a floating layers window that is dockable?

 

Nope. I've got utility tools in our project that edits the values of those. Perfectly editable. Not very much work to build an editor window that interacts with them.

 

Could you help with it?
Let's make a community created Layer window

https://forum.unity.com/threads/dockable-layers-window-open-source.581179/

I'm not a programmer, but I will try to look into it. and make some visual mockups

 

Programmers settled !
Now it's time to take care of designers and artists who can't program
Democratization for everyone - editor should be easy to use if you want all ( or most ) of your users happy !

 

Thanks to @Baste we now have a dockable Layer window!
Very happy with it!
@Vagabond_ thanks for feedback!

 

The state of the art of font rendering quality reminds me of desktop linux circa 2000. When I try to select font like Verdana I get ugly antialiasing (not clear hinted font). I keep my fingers crossed that it will never be released.

 

Why? Nobody will ever force you to change the font if you don't want to.

 

It == New Font Rendering
https://forum.unity.com/threads/new-editor-theme.564484/page-7#post-3863869
https://forum.unity.com/threads/new-editor-theme.564484/page-4#post-3783124

 

So you want to scratch the entire new UI with all of the improvements, because you don't like the fonts. ROFL