Official Overlays Developer Guide

Oh, right.

@gabrielw_unity, GameView being internal is an insane pain point for a ton of reasons. We can't use overlays with it. We can't find it in order to dock other windows next to it. We can't re-dock it somewhere else. We can't set the gameView vSync value from script. We can't toggle gizmos from script. There's a bunch of other things.

It's yet another one of those cases where Unity's being overly conservative with what to enable users to do, to the detriment of the users.

 

So I thought. But.. what about main toolbar? I think that I saw you being able to DnD tools from here in early videos, but it seems to be fully fixed now.

 

What's the workflow for styling the overlay elements? I want to move the positions of my elements but it seems that they are automatically set and I can only register what elements exist. I would like to make a toggle checkbox above a dropdown, but all I can get is a toggle button instead and it always places beside my dropdown rather than above or below.



When I override CreatePanelContent(), it places them above, but I can't figure out how to add a space between elements, and my dropdown renders the arrow on a new line.



Should I be using the Overlays IMGUI support instead, and is there a guide somewhere I can follow for it?

 

Hello @gabrielw_unity ,

I'm working on a custom Overlay and I can only implement the CreatePanelContent method not CreateHorizontalToolbarContent nor CreateVerticalToolbarContent.
After closer inspection the ToolbarOverlay class I use for inheritance, it has an implementation of the 2 methods but they aren't virtual.
And the 2 interfaces required to implement those in another class, ICreateHorizontalToolbar and ICreateVerticalToolbar, are internal.

Am I missing something regarding the implementation of those methods?

 

Is there a simple workflow to use uxml/uss with overlays? I noticed you can't assign uxml to public VisualTreeAsset properties directly in the defaultReferences from the interface like you can do with EditorWindow, and UI Toolkit Live Reload does not influence the reloading of overlay windows built this way (I guess the two problems may be connected?). In fact, I guess the only way to force the reloading of an Overlay window while developing is to force code re-compilation, right?

 

It's possible to set default visibiliy now? I set displayed to true in constructor of my toolbar overlay but it not works.

 

Is it possible to specify default docking of an overlay?

Also I'd like to know if its possible to make overlay resizable by user somehow? I think custom tools for editing would benefit from it. Like if overlay contains "brush settings" for some painting tool

 

That's nice to know, thanks. Though I can't seem to find much about resizing in docs except size property. To be clear, by resizing I meant allow user to change size of an overlay same way we can drag windows around. Am I missing something or is it not supported at the moment?

 

Any improvement on this side to expect ? I wanted to support some of our runtime tools with an overlay to limit the amount of windows our team has to maintain and open, but I'll have to switch back to that.

 

Well as was said above by a couple of users, it would be nice to have the Game window accepting the overlays.
My use case was to add something in the editor-side for a runtime tool. Our level designers mainly work in the Game window, so adding stuff in there would be great.

 

How can I add overlays as you have for Box colliders and other systems appearing inside the Tools overlay window?

I have a vector3 Property for my custom component for which I want to implement a scene handle for controlling it.

 

I'm pretty sure that's an EditorTool you're looking at, so you'd have to implement one of those for your custom component.

 

That worked, Thanks.

I have one more question, How do I add multiple buttons/Toggles to my editor tools, right now I only have one Toggle

Also, how do I change the "Sp" to an Icon, using the Icon attribute changed the button's icon and not the header attribute Like:

 

Any easy way to get the overlay's current width?

 

What's the recommended way of adding a RadioButton group to an overlay toolbar (in 2022.2)?

Something that works like the "Tools" toolbar where you can only have one of the Move, Rotate, Scale etc tools selected. If that code is in a package or on github I'd appreciate a pointer.

 

Being able to assign

VisualTreeAsset

to serialized properties on Overlays feels like a huge missing feature. Will this be added in some way soon? And what is the recommended workaround? LoadAssetAtPath feels painfully hardcoded...

 

What is the key bind for the overlay menu?

The documentation says this:

1. In the Scene view, press the ` key to display the Overlays menu.

But how is that in non-US keyboards? The US keyboards are the only ones who support the key directly and it's been annoying ever since id software use that for their in-game console, ie decades ago.

 

I'm pretty sure it's spacebar? Or did they change it for 2022?

 

It's not spacebar anymore

 

Please add overlay to inspector

Actually we need only horizontal toolbar on top of it so we can add custom buttons and data in it

 

Hi, this isn't the same, but it might help you. It let's you add stuff with IMGUI to the inspector's header: finishedDefaultHeaderGUI.

 

I wanted an overlay with a transparent background similar to the orientation overlay in the top right corner. I struggled for a bit with getting access to the correct visual element because in CreatePanelContent the root visual container for the overlay is not attached to any other visual element yet.
But you can get there using the OnGeometryChanged event!

(just as a quick extracted example: )

Code (CSharp):

1.  
2. private VisualElement root;
3.  
4. public override VisualElement CreatePanelContent()
5.     {
6.         root = new VisualElement() { name = "My Panel Root" };
7.         root.Add(new Label() { text = "Hello" });
8.         root.RegisterCallback<GeometryChangedEvent>(OnGeometryChanged);      
9.         return root;
10.     }
11.  
12. private void OnGeometryChanged(GeometryChangedEvent evt)
13.     {
14. VisualElement overlayContainer = root.parent.parent;
15. overlayContainer.style.backgroundColor = new StyleColor(new Color(0, 0, 0, 0.1f));
16. root.UnregisterCallback<GeometryChangedEvent>(OnGeometryChanged);
17.     }

have fun

 

Does anyone know how to set the docked state and position for an overlay from c#?

I've added a simple button to an overlay, while the click callback works, the visual change does not happen. Confusingly the debugger shows the state change. What is going on?!



--> i figured out why it isn't working technically but I don't get the decision why it should be behaving this way.
there are two style class references for the button in the overlay
.unity-button and .unity-overlay .unity-button

the second one which selects buttons inside the overlay overwrites border width and background color and therefore prevents any hover and active pseudo states.. why? because we should use EditorToolbarButton instead of Button? Those look a bit different but apart from that work (and the different style can be fixed with AddToClassList("unity-button").

 

How to make custom overlay be shown in ScreneView by default? "Default Display" in OverlayAttribute does nothing.

Code (CSharp):

1.     [UnityEditor.Overlays.Overlay(typeof(SceneView), id, "GameCamera Tools", id, true)]
2.     class GameCameraToolbar : UnityEditor.Overlays.ToolbarOverlay
3.     {
4.         const string id = "game-camera-overlay";
5.  
6.         public GameCameraToolbar() : base(CameraFullResetButton.id, CameraRotationResetButton.id)
7.         {
8.            
9.         }
10.     }

Using Unity 2021.3.33f

 

Maybe you could try sth with the InitializeOnLoad attribute and set the overlay visible for all open scene views in the constructor, probably with editor prefs as backing field for if it should be shown.. how these kind of displays were done before overlays but the default display attribute worked for me in 2022.3. Is it possible that the display value gets serialized when the class is compiled for the first time and set to false if the attribute wasn't present then? Have you tried renaming the file and the class?

 

I have this class around for a long time in multiple project, and it never displayed by default in any projects on any PC. I assume it's a bug.

InitializeOnLoad though. Well, I guess I can give it a try. Not sure if stuff I need is internal or not though.