Official Scene Visibility Tools - Info and Discussion Thread

Also, are there any plans for streaming scenes to show up / hide automatically (in the hierarchy/vis list) when streaming, particularly when around / far away from the camera in-editor?

This is killing me in developing streaming games in-editor.

 

@gabrielw_unity Thanks for looking into that ! Those options seem to cover our needs, we will wait for them.
@neil_devine I'm not confident in erasing Library stuff at runtime =D but the alternative of calling ShowAll on a callback like EditorSceneManager.sceneOpened sounds like a good idea, I will give it a try.

 

Sorry for the delay --

So basically, when I am designing maps for a streaming world game (whether it is a 2d or 3d game), I generally have an area of the map that I am working in, but rather than working in one place at a time, I tend to work all over the map at once (using my plugin, Snapcam, to navigate me around the world instantaneously). Getting around the scene this quickly inherently means that I must show/hide/load/unload any distant scenes manually.


The problem with this is that, whenever I instantly "snap" to a new position in the world so that I can edit the objects there, I have to manually load/unload various scenes / display any hidden objects for performance CONSTANTLY, with no way to ensure what I need to show/hide/load/unload will be taken care of as I arrive.
Due to these performance issues that sometime crash the editor, I cannot simply use the editor to EDIT my streaming game -- To do this (at least for art), I am forced to use external tools like Blender or Houdini in very non-standard ways to modify my art due to Unity's editor-specific issues like floating point limitations or just general unwieldiness when I'm snapping around these large worlds.
Ultimately, the area around the editor camera should automatically load new scenes and automatically hide and unload other far away areas (or turn them into imposters after a certain distance, so you can visualize the skyline).


In general, I would probably want to specify a distance threshold from the camera where scene hierarchies (specified by a master scene) would either display imposters after I move a certain distance away, or be unloaded entirely. When I start back toward this position (within a given threshold) or when I suddenly move the camera there, I would want the scene to be reloaded so that it displays imposters/LODS as I approach it, and then becomes fully detailed after I reach a certain distance from its central origin (perhaps the first gameobject in the scene is the origin of that loaded scene?)

Positioning in super large streaming worlds gets trickier as the units scale, but using in-editor tools to craft these large worlds gets even trickier (or impossible) with certain long-distance movements beyond a certain threshold. My worlds are getting bigger, and my goto tools are failing me.

Perhaps handling floating origins in-editor (for visibility/loading purposes) might be an option? -- i.e. if my position is 100,000 km, then the Editor itself sees only a small bit of this at a time, locally around the world origin, which allows users like me who are authoring streaming worlds to use tools like ProBuilder as if they were close to the origin (despite them actually being crazy far away.) Unity would just compress the positioning in chunks of whatever size the user specifies so that these crazy-far-away scenes can be visualized/hidden/unloaded/reloaded and (most importantly) EDITED, whenever necessary.

Ultimately, showing/hiding scenes/objects for me automatically as I zip around my world is what I want SceneVis to help me do, but the last time I checked, the Editor itself can't do even basic scene positioning when loading a scene (i.e. loading/unloading a scene into/from a specific position in the world). So SceneVis won't work for what I actually need it to do -- especially when it involves editing a scene that has a floating origin (like mentioned above). Unity as a whole assumes I'm just working on ONE single area/scene all the time. Unity assumes that area will never be far enough away from the origin for it to ever matter that using a tool like Probuilder (or other official Unity tools) to design my world at far away distances is actually impossible without the floating origin being recalculated periodically (when the position shifts to far away distances) and assumes I will just make my own tools (i.e. Reprogram Probuilder) for handling such use-cases. However, it is clear to me that these floating origin use-cases are becoming more and more common and I am struggling to keep up with the editor's own scene-management API throughout Unity's progression into a modern editor. MegaCity is a lot to digest, for example, but doesn't handle the floating origin visibility scenario.

I know that visibility options and better hierarchy management is the purpose of SceneVis tools, but visibility is even more important with a streaming world -- especially one with a floating origin -- because one needs the tools to visualize it in-place and manage it even more carefully than a standard-fare portal-based / static world.



My only options for this kind of visualization in Unity is to work on every single area of my game (i.e. using Probuilder) near the origin, never being able to fully visualize the connected world as it really is, OR always rely on third-party modeling programs like Houdini or Blender to see the meshes properly positioned and semi-connected (but with complicated visibility scene-loading setups in the modeler (that would be better-off programmed once in the game engine instead) with the inaccuracies of all the wrong materials/lighting due to it not being in-engine. Otherwise, we must duplicate work.
So far, the only "solution" (to the in-game streaming at least) is the very "iffy" (and dated) (and poorly documented) World Streamer asset that can only do so much anyway when it, too, struggles with the editor's mandates on positioning/loading/visibility.
In the end, all I really need is to show/hide/load/unload things at the proper moments, and display them in the correct places so I can visualize them (usually following some kind of square or hexagonal grid formation).
This process seems so fundamental for a modern game engine, but I can't help but wonder why is process this is SO overlooked by third-party game engine development teams? -- Do I really need a separate game engine for the single mundane purpose of simply showing/hiding/unloading the things I need to show/hide/unload at a given moment just so I can EDIT the world?
This is all distance-based visualization stuff that Unity should already do for me, especially as streaming games with streaming assets have been (and continue to be) the norm in the same games industry that aims for hyper-realistic realtime graphics. The heavier the graphics, the more burden it puts on the editor.

This is killing me. :/

I just want to be able to move around and work in the Editor freely and not have it die on me!

Making games is tedious enough, but with the editor itself not being able to do its own job without my assistance... This gets unnerving to say the least... SceneVis should (inherently) be about helping to maintain both performance and flow (as should all parts of the Unity Editor!) But as far as I see it, when it comes to either performance OR flow, with editing streaming game worlds, Unity's editor doesn't have a clue about all the problems and headaches conjured up by the single issue of basic visibility in streaming world workflows, and developing tools willy-nilly to solve editor visibility without fully considering these issues is a recipe for disaster. I just want to use Unity's official tools to let me visualize / edit the materials/objects across my scenes (with usable performance!) wherever they may be, while being able to zip around my game world as I see fit.

This really should not be too much to ask. Who knows which team is on it -- either way, you guys seriously still need to __work together__ to make a usable in-editor workflow for streaming game world visibility.



TL;DR:

If you don't have time to listen to my amazingly well-spelled-out frustrations, you probably should skip this anyway. lol This is mainly just for the Unity dev who asked me to clarify the problem, so I'm offering as much clarification / details as I feel is necessary to spell out the significant pains I am going through (while also offering potential solutions). This is, after all, a discussion thread. There's lots to discuss.



And if you read this, thanks for taking the time! -- These kinds of workflows seriously need to be addressed. Games are only going to get larger. Unity will be so much better for it in the end.

 

Quick question: I'm using "SceneVisibilityManager.HideAll" in a script to hide all objects in the Scene view.

This works fine, except when I hit the Play button. If the game is running, and I click over onto the Scene tab - all of the hidden objects are now rendering, even though they are all marked hidden in the SceneVis.

Clicking the Hide/Show eyeball in the object hierarchy has no effect as long as the game is running. If I shut the game down, then the settings are respected again and the objects will disappear as expected.

Is this intentional?

Is there a work around to get the behavior I'm looking for ( if I hide objects in the scene view, they stay hidden regardless of whether or not I'm playing the game ).

Thank you!

 

That's fine! -- I really don't mind as long as it actually gets seen and discussed!

Hopefully this didn't come across in a negative way.

I love Unity and very much appreciate the effort that goes into coming up with and implementing great ideas like SceneVis to handle common issues with Unity. I simply wanted to point out some holes I'm seeing in the thinking behind things like this and offer ideas for ways of thinking about potential solutions. I know I tend to think about things a lot differently than most, but sometimes my insights can be valuable to the right listener. Hopefully that is the case here.

 

Hi guys,
I am having some issues with the picking and visibility flags: they don't work for GameObjects with editor flags HideFlags.DontSave.
I tried using both the hierarchy windows and the scripting API.
Why is that, and is there any workaround?
Thanks

 

My major question is -- are we supposed to be deprecating the HideFlags from our workflows?
What are we working toward to use to replace their use in our projects?

 

Thank you for the information.
It's quite a shame
I hope it would be possible to control these flags on DontSave objects (very useful for procedurally generated objects) someday, without the persistent part of the feature.
Thanks

 

Thanks for your understanding.
In my usecase, I don't care about persistency for DontSave objects, since the DontSave objects are all children of a persistent one. So basically I would like to be able to control the visibility/picking flags of the DontSave sub-objects from my root persistent object using the visibility and picking events from the API.

 

Thanks
Bug has been reported with ticket ID 1217361.
Cheers

 

@gabrielw_unity @neil_devine We're testing updating from 2019.2 to 2019.3 and hit the scene picker not working in the DontDestroyOnLoad scene - the setting is ignored and things are pickable all the time.

The picking in DontDestroyOnLoad problem was mentioned in a previous post (#141). Did this happen to be bug reported and/or fixed? Thanks for any info.

 

Hi Neil @neil_devine, thanks for your quick reply. I submitted a bug a few minutes after your post. I haven't had an email/confirmation of it but ***Updated it did finally appear in fogbugz. Case #1234777

 

Hi,
I'm trying to use SceneVisibiltyManager on a number of objects to disable picking in the editor but I'm getting a few errors on the way.
I have this on each script -

Code (CSharp):

1. if (sv == null)
2. {
3.     sv = ScriptableObject.CreateInstance<SceneVisibilityManager>();
4. }

But I'm getting an error ScriptableSingleton already exists. Did you query the singleton in a constructor?
Am I approaching that wrong? It works okay as is but the errors are slightly disconcerting.

Thanks,
Pete

 

@neil_devine, just for curiosity. Why have you started using the singleton patterns? In past all 'singletons' were implemented just with static methods.

 

Because he is a fan of "The Highlander" and the above explains it all.

 

Hi!

I'm trying to have a custom camera cull the objects hidden via the scene visibility tools.

(I need to do this because I'm implementing a custom camera mode for the scene view).

I tried the following but I can't seem to get it to work:

Code (CSharp):

1. var camera = // my custom camera
2. var sceneView = SceneView.lastActiveSceneView;
3. camera.cameraType = CameraType.SceneView;
4. camera.scene = sceneView.camera.scene;
5. camera.overrideSceneCullingMask = sceneView.camera.overrideSceneCullingMask;

Is there any other setting I need to set or other API I could call?

EDIT: Strangely, this seems to work for my terrain object (the relevant line is setting the CameraType to SceneView), but not for my other renderers. What's the logic here?

 

Thanks! Handles.DrawCamera did the trick.
I used DrawCameraMode.UserDefined.

 

Hi! I met strange behaviour for scene picking tools caused by prefabs.
In short, if I disable parent and enable children pickability I still can pick parent if it is prefab.

 

One more variation of behaviour if nested prefabs after override used.

 

I just checked 2021.1 alpha, unfortunately after two years this LOD setting is still not available
https://forum.unity.com/threads/sce...fo-and-discussion-thread.593476/#post-3996004

 

This sounds like a great request -- but it also would be nice to have a ShaderLODs to (more easily) go with model LODGroups.

 

Is there anyway to check the state of this button, or change it's state, via script?


I was using SceneVisibilityManager.instance.Hide(...) to hide a gameobject but it wasn't working. Now I've found out why, but need to control this option via script. Thanks!

 

What would also be handy is a way to "LABEL" said meshes in groups -- and access / hide / show those groups that way (and even handle culling or colliders or other operations based on said labels). :S

 

Ho,

i wonder what happened to Hierarchy Window improvements. It's been almost a couple of years since we gave feedback and requested features which were planned and we still have scene visibility and lock features only !

Where are the "standard to every software out there" hierarchy window layers ?
Where are the hierarchy lines ? ( this should be added as an option though )

Is this the final variant of the hierarchy window ?

 

I like this one
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/enhanced-hierarchy-2-0-44322

and yes it would be nice if unity had this functionally

 

I don't know what happened, but I can't seem to get rid of the visibility settings anymore.



No matter what I do... clicking on them, alt-clicking on them does not remove its status... I am stuck! Is this bug?

 

This bug has been there for a while -- What version are you on?


Also, just to be clear -- are you trying to hide/show an "inactive-but-visible" scene?

 

Some of its visibility status in various state cant be changed no matter what I do..

I think the bug is related to the prefab objects and its childrens..

I am on 2021.b7

 

My scene visibility "eye" icons are stuck as enabled in each of my 2019.4.23f1 project hierarchies and I do not know how to turn them off. I have clicked on all eye icons but they just stay enabled.

Is there a unhide all option anywhere?

The only solution I can find is to reload the scene!

 

I landed up deleting the prefab from the scene and replaced it lost some references but oh well...

 

Is there anyway to disable the scene visibility in the hierarchy all together. Honestly I hate it. It clutters my already cluttered hierarchy and adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to my scene. I'm coming from Unity 2018. All these new features are a drag on my productivity. The old Hierarchy was much cleaner and easier to see. These extra two coloums on the left hand side are just atrocious. Thanks!

 

I sometimes have the issue that SceneVis breaks on UI elements, meaning it will not hide them.
Pressing "Shift + H" twice to enter/exit isolation mode usually fixes it but it's a nuisance. Sadly it happens randomly so I have no reliable reproduction case. Anyone having simmilar issues?

Here is a short video of the "bug" in action:
https://kamgam.com/unity/SceneVisCanvasBug.mp4

 

Wow. I'm surprised this bug is still here. D:

And yeah -- I've dealt with it before myself. It seems to have something to do with having multiple scenes open at once and clicking on them and trying to show/hide them in weird/unexpected ways by the developers.
After doing that, the bug sometimes shows up.

How many scenes do you have (uncollapsed) in the scene hierarchy? -- It seems to happen after collapsing and uncollapsing items sometimes and trying to "hide all" and trying to show or hide individual items.