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Text mesh pro equivalent when in game UIElement will be out?

Discussion in 'UI Toolkit' started by Sylmerria, May 22, 2019.

  1. Sylmerria

    Sylmerria

    Joined:
    Jul 2, 2012
    Posts:
    369
    Hi UIElement team,

    I'm wondering how do you will manage font when UIElement will be available in game.
    UGUI text are bad, it's why Unity bought Text Mesh pro.

    So with this new UI renderer, do you will support all text mesh pro features (and with ease ) ?
    Also with this, do you have plan for support text selection natively like in a input field but for label etc ?

    Thanks
     
    Sylmerria, May 22, 2019
    #1
    dracine likes this.

  2. antoine-unity

    antoine-unity

    Unity Technologies

    Joined:
    Sep 10, 2015
    Posts:
    780
    Hello,

    What is happening is that we are consolidating the technology behind TMP into a new foundation layer named TextCore that UIElements can use directly (as well as future versions of TextMesh Pro).

    So UIElements in-game from the get go will use TextCore with the main goal of rendering text as SDF (Signed Distance Field).

    The initial preview version won't offer more control over text that what you have access to right now but for the release of UIElements we will definitely give full access to the capabilities of TextCore/TextMeshPro.

    I can't provide an ETA for text selection it yet. That being said it would be an interesting use case to test the extensibility of both UIElements and TextCore APIs once everything is in place.
     
    antoine-unity, May 22, 2019
    #2
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  3. Sylmerria

    Sylmerria

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    Sylmerria, May 23, 2019
    #3

  4. Korindian

    Korindian

    Joined:
    Jun 25, 2013
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    584
    @antoine-unity Is Unity looking into including functionality for using SDF for UI icons for UIElements? We currently have SDF text with TMPro that can scale to any resolution with crisp edges, so we can design once and with anchors have it work at any resolution. This is not the case with images however.

    Unity is working on SVGs which would solve the problem, but there is no antialiasing or crisp edges in Screen Space Overlay or in Built-in deferred or HDRP deferred. It would be great if Unity looked into this so we can design a complete UI at one reference resolution and have it scale and look crisp at any other resolution.
     
    Korindian, May 24, 2019
    #4
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  5. wbahnassi_unity

    wbahnassi_unity

    Unity Technologies

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    Mar 12, 2018
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    The ultimate goal for us is to reach a featureset that allows you to author scalable UI content across resolutions and aspect ratios. The tools at hand currently are TMP with its SDF, and SVG for general artwork. SDF works great only under certain view ranges, so we don't consider it here as a magic bullet for everything. In the meantime, we also totally understand the importance of good looking UI icons under low and high resolutions with anti-aliasing. We're working towards that, but we don't want the entry point for such icons to be strictly through the text system. I like to see SVG exactly as regular images but with infinite resolution added, otherwise both behave the same.
    I hope this gives you an indication as to what to expect from the UIElements eco-system down the road.
     
    wbahnassi_unity, May 29, 2019
    #5
    jhocking, Korindian and optimise like this.

  6. Korindian

    Korindian

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    Jun 25, 2013
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    Thanks for responding, I really appreciate it. It's so nice to hear that there is someone at Unity who gets all of this, especially when we have to deal with such a wide variety of resolutions on desktop. I'm really hoping you guys can tackle the antialiasing issues soon. All the best on solving all these challenges.
     
    Korindian, May 30, 2019
    #6
    wbahnassi_unity likes this.