Resolved Official Recommendation - Unity UI vs UI Toolkit?

Hey everyone!

For anyone starting a new Unity project today, what is the recommendation from the official Unity team?
Go with UI Toolkit and don't touch Unity UI?
Use Unity UI for some specific things and UI Toolkit for some other specific things? What scenarios would you recommend one or the other?

Or perhaps the recommendation is based on team size?
I've only used UI Toolkit a little bit but from what I've seen one of the big benefits is splitting structure-logic-visual so you can have a programmer, UI designer and artist all working on the same UI element without any conflicts. Based on that it seems like an excellent tool for big teams where each person does a different task, but what about a solo dev?

Thanks!

 

While I'm not from Unity, the official comparison can be very helpful: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/UI-system-compare.html

 

Also not unity staff, but having recently tried to implement a runtime UI in UI Toolkit, I don’t think it’s even close to ready for runtime use, especially if you care about being able to style it or use a game controller. I tried to implement the same basic settings menu in uGUI and UIToolkit, so it was an apples to apples comparison.

 

> I don’t think it’s even close to ready for runtime use

I don't agree. It depends on your needs. If all you need is a basic UI with some interaction, UIToolkit can do it.

However, I don't see how UIToolkit would integrate with the physics system and other components. If you need this (physics, colliders) or some of its unfinished features (e.g. shaders, see the linked comparison above), you should stay with uGUI.

> if you care about being able to style it

The stylesheets are exactly for this. Changing style is a matter of loading different stylesheets.
You can even use variables in stylesheets and only overwrite these to apply different colors, sizes, etc.

> or use a game controller

From my experience, the default controller navigation is just as bad as it was with uGUI.
I agree, you need to implement a better default controller navigation.
I came up with my own solution, but it isn't great either.

I think, default controller navigation needs to consider the hierarchy of the elements.
Further, one could use USS classes or attributes in UXML to opt-in / opt-out as a navigation target.
Next / previous VisualElement when navigating in a certain direction could also be specified as attribute, e.g. next-component-up="#the-component-id"

 

As I understand if we need to have UI effects particles etc that UI Toolkit is no way and we need to stick to uGui right?

 

Is there no way to render a particle system in front of a UIDocument?
I think it may require UIDocuments in 3D space, which is not supported yet?

 

Maybe my question is
can we in URP draw all or part of UI Documents in some render feature and then all other render features?

In another worlds can we draw UIDocuments not by magic in not controlled order but controlled order by URP default feature RenderFeature?

 

I guess another thing to consider is third-party plugins/utilities, shared knowledge, etc. I haven't used UI Toolkit apart from some simple tests a long time ago, but I assume that for now there are more resources for uGUI, right?

 

Sure. For example, check this thread I made where I attempt to change the font in a drop down menu for a runtime UI.

 

to close the loop on this, Etienne at Unity says in this thread:

So I guess the 'official recommendation' is use uGUI for runtime UI.