New Gizmos in Alpha 9 are great

From the Release Notes:

Just wanted to drop in and say thank you for improving the transform gizmos.
No more frustrating axis selection. It's working great.

I got a good feeling about 2020.2

 

There are so many small things that it becomes such a big deal.
I wish they really eat their own dog food one day.

 

"eat your own dog food" means using Unity to build stuff, in this context. Like Unreal that builds games using Unreal, or Plastic SCM developers that use Plastic SCM to develop it.

I'm super appreciative of all the development that is going on, especially with editor performance. I just popped here to clear that up because it sounds much worse than it actually is.

 

Hey, Aras, If you are up for it, how about adding an automatic animation play option to the Animation Preview window for an instance? It should be a 5-minute job for you that can save huge pain in the butt.

Yeah SugoiDev, This is just an example of what I mean by eating your own dog food, something that you would have discovered years ago if you are using your own tools.

 

Add MSAA to gizmos pleeeaase

 

For the interested reader:

Aras posted various details about Handles on his personal blog at https://aras-p.info/blog/2020/04/11/Various-details-about-Handles/

@Aras: I very much appreciate that you write these blog posts. Thank you!

 

Nice blog!

That's really cool - as you say resolutions have got to the point where it's hard to see single pixel lines now. I have to squint to see my Debug.DrawLines.

This is a great feature. I wonder, is it going to be possible to draw these handles inline with bursted job code in the future?

It would be really nice to just be able to do a DebugDrawLineWithThickness () style function exactly where the data I want to draw with is.

 

how to stop gizmos crashing unity?

 

Is "optimizing gizmos" on the same list?

Drawing n cube gizmos in the scene view is several orders of magnitude slower than drawing n cube gameobjects. I'm guessing that gizmos uses some kind of immediate mode rendering that simply doesn't scale. They're also very clearly not culled by the scene view camera, since if I cull gizmos manually I can notice a pretty significant speedup.

 

And chance OnDrawGizmo get anything? Like 2D gizmos?

 

@Aras

1) Is it ever going to be possible to simply Gizmos.DrawLine (and other Gizmo functions) in a bursted job or a non-bursted job or at least outside of a OnDrawGizmos function?

2) Why can't we use Gizmos in standalone builds if we want to? Even if it's only a Development standalone build.

 

Just like a circle/disc, rectangle, triangle options in Gizmos. Something more 2D specific than the cube and sphere we already have. (i guess i'm just asking if more Gizmos options will ever be coming)

Also is text a possibility for Gizmos?

 

I just hope a new API is created from scratch instead of trying to fix the old ones.

 

If you want to draw text when you're drawing Gizmos, you'll need to use Handles.Label

Which is... not great! It's very bad at not being on the screen when it's outside the view frustrum. It's also, unlike Gizmos, Editor only, so you have to #if it out.


The ideal world would be if we could have something like Handles.BeginGUI, but with a transform matrix/plane/whatever to define world space position. Alternatively a way to feed it UI Toolkit stuff.

 

@JoNax97, meh, Unity generally does too much "let's make a new and better version". Gizmos has a comfortable interface, and is very good at what it does, it's just slow and lacks good text handling.

 

Wait, Handles works in OnDrawGizmos?

 

I was thinking about a feature rich debug/tooling C# API that lives in the new Unity.* family of namespaces, that can be safely called from jobs and that can be extended as necessary and supports, like you said, UIElements. I think there's no point on touching the current ones except if a QOL fix is a low hanging fruit.

 

Something that would be immediately beneficial is a GizmoDrawingScope
Just like Handles.DrawingScope

You can, just wrap the Handles code in #if UNITY_EDITOR

 

Ah I see.

I guess this explains why internal Unity projects like the DOTS FPS have their own functions for some of this stuff.

Maybe I'll have to write my own jobs and burst capable debug draw library.

 

Many thanks to aras! Usability improvements are much appreciated.

 

Lol man not been able to submit a bug report since 2015.. i just found out the hub can do one and it works, i desperately need gizmo bugs to be fixed, all u need to do is list what app is creating the gizmos in the log! Something reboots unity, probably old but I have no ideas what, soon as u tap gizmos unity dies. After 1 yr I do have a buig report submitted.