Feedback The Unity Editor Scene experience is still completely ridiculous in 2022 LTS and defies any logic

We are are 2022 LTS now and nobody even touched this stuff. It's been a decade.

I am tired of not being able to read names of my content
I am tired of not being able to see icons of my prefabs

I am so tired of having objects be placed at
x -151.2141023
y 2.569124e
z 1.12222222
when they are pasted in the scene

I am tired of newly created objects spawning at -22, 4, 0.4, or in center of the screen, or randomly offscreen
I am tired of copy pasting objects landing at a completely random position
I am tired of pasting a perfectly centered object into a new object for it to be completely offset randomly
There is zero care for snapping or grids in general even when enabled.


Lets talk about the hierarchy:

- Dragged in objects spawn at a random position at the very top of the list, sometimes first, sometimes 5th.
- I cannot paste an object into another.
- Folder selection is ignored when placing prefabs onto the ground
- Placing prefabs into the hierarchy however gives them a terrible random position
- I cannot even paste an object next to each other
- Creating a empty parent dosn't center on the child but on its parent folder
- Doublicating a spawned object moves it thousands of objects apart to the very bottom of the entire scene

It is trying all possible registers to make the biggest mess in your scene as humanly possible.


This stuff hasnt been touched in a decade and if Unity made games and had to actually work with the tools, this would have been fixed many years ago. If you need a reference for a good hierarchy look at Cinema 4D or something like that. I happily list you all the things you need to know and give you a detailed list, just the impulse has to come from you.

Sorry for the sarcastic tone but this is completely insane to all be untouched for so long and its painfully frustrating.


Edit: --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How the logic should be:
- Always insert new creations below the current selection.
- Same for copy paste and ctrl-D. Respect if the selection is a folder.
- If no selection exists, insert at the bottom. (Since code inserts at the bottom) Not 50:50 top/bot.
That's it. There is really nothing more to it.

For Positions:
- Zero below the currently selected parent object (if none exists, the scene is parent)
This counts for created meshes through both(!) dropdowns and objects dragged into the hiearchy.
- If you drag inside the scene, at least round the third decimal so it dosnt look awful
- If you drag inside the hierarchy, center to the parent object you dragged it into, not random
- If you insert a parent to your object, center the parent to the object you selected
- If you create a new prefab, Zero the prefab positions, not keep random world position
- If you copy paste into a new object, keep the current position in worldspace
- If you copy paste into a isolated prefab, zero it instead of doing something random

Other:
- "Show in Explorer" should show the contents of the folder, not where the folder is located

Edit2: -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The unity team did some very commendable improvements for 2022.3+ LTS it seems.
+ You can now copy something in another object and have it zeroed.
+ Copying a object into another parent keeps the position intact
+ Ctrl-D now inserts at the position below!
+ There is a setting to have objects spawn in 0,0 in the scene
+ Creating a object into a parent has it spawn at 0,0
+ Dragging a prefab in a parent spawns it at 0,0 wow!
Probably even more things. Very nice!

 

I mean, they started making Gigaya then NOPED hard.

Your video is private btw.

 

Fixed

 

In my years of using Unity, I have (for some reason) never used copy/paste to duplicate an object in the scene. I've only ever used ctrl-D to duplicate the object. I just tried copy/paste after seeing how screwy it performed in your video, and yup, exact same behavior. What's specifically happening is that it's keeping the pasted object's local position the same as the copied object's local position, regardless of which parent the object gets pasted into. Definitely not working correctly.

Good video overall. Highlights a lot of pain points.

 

I generally always use CTRL+D, the issue is that it does also move the object to the opposite side of the scene, which makes things super messy, if not completely disorienting.

Then if we combine this with the random mixing of inserting objects at the top or the bottom, it basically force-shuffles your scene constantly, making it extremely tedious to keep a clean scene even if you are trying hard to be orderly.

 

Compare this to source 2 (S&Box I assume is a bit restyled)



You see the Uncategorized category? In unity everything is uncategorized.
Source makes it hard to make a mess. Unity makes it hard to not make a mess.


Cinema 4D has probably the best hierarchy system in 3D software



Of course are there icons with different color codings, and all the copying, inserting, centering, grid etc works flawlessy. you can also set layers:



Any folder or objects can have a layer.
Layers then can be toggled to be clickable, visible, soloed, in the hierarchy visible, locked, script executing and more.

There are many more features like the take system where you can save snapshots of object states, or filter flat hierarchy by type, or give custom icons and colors and whatnot.

We however really don't need anything super fancy in unity but the absolute basics need to be working somewhat acceptably which still do not.

 

Great, another "Why Unity isn't XYZ engine" thread. The surprising part is that it's not Unreal this time.

 

The thread is about the fact that Editor UI team still can't fix names in grid view of project window being unreadable. The state of UX around ProjectWindow and SceneView is horrible, but instead of fixing fundamental issues they are changing camera preview into new overlay system

 

Absolutely not what the thread is about, you should read first before commenting

 

Well, we have a mostly well defined rule-set how the editor works in this area. Maybe instead of "why it doesn't work like the Source Engine" you could write down why on Earth the rule-set you find convenient you want to be the default for everyone. And of course, you should write down what rules you want. Otherwise this thread is exactly about why Unity isn't Source Engine. And of course as always you can customize all the editor for yourself however you want.

 

Would you like to address any of the points he makes in the video about how usability could be significantly improved?

 

@EricFFG on the one hand I'm very sorry you're experiencing this.

On the other.... THANK YOU!! I go through much of this each day, and many other complete head scratchers. There's some solace in knowing others are experiencing this with the same amazement, astonishment and bewilderment, especially given how long it's been this way.

 

I put bullet points and suggestions. This reads like you have not read anything.

We do not have a well defined ruleset. That is a big part of why it is frustrating.

 

Another point which is very annoying is that you cannot copy paste in the project

You have to drag and drop things all across the folders which is extremely slow and disorienting

First you have to locate the place where you want to go, then go back, drag it, and find back the place you wanted to go to, its just so slow and confusing

 

No, the point is "Why doesn't Unity make sense?" and "look, this other engine has an explicit internal logic".

Unity does not have general design rules that after you get a sense of, you can start intuiting how things work with other features, because every feature or UI section either has its own separate logic, or it used to have its own logic and is slowly being transitioned to something else and there are a ton of stuff that are being left in weird undefined behaviours that make no sense.

And why do you want simple requests? Those are as useless as the "Why Unity isn't XYZ engine" posts you so despise.

How about Folders in the project view that are not transforms and are only there for organisational purposes? This has been a request Unity users request long before people knew how Unreal or Source worked en masse. This is a straightforward and reasonable request, but in the end it's just as useful as "Why Unity isn't XYZ engine" because nothing is done.

 

I just had to copy another object from one folder to the other

This process is so ridiculous without copy paste if you have a couple folders, I should make a recording of it

 

You make such excellent videos it might be worth doing that, and then considering scripting a "critique of UI and UX of Unity Editor, from a user" kind of video. As Unity clearly needs to see this kind of thing, spelt out.

Especially now that the only person that seemed to consider these things ( @aras-p ) has gone.

 

What do you mean? There are surely other people now having responsibility for the editor

 

he was the only one, in the latter part of his time at Unity, that seemed to care about the user experience of using the Editor.

 

That is very much not true. Maybe I was the one who talked about it the most

 

Given that flattening of the hierarchy is the single simplest and most effective means of improving performance, yet also completely destroys usability without the above mentioned Folders, which would also directly address a raft of other issues with increasingly large Scenes, is one of these quiet fine folks working on bringing this forward and into our mere user lives?

 

Whilst we're on the subject of Copy and Paste, as per this thread, can someone at Unity consider making it possible to Copy and Paste between Unity instances, too? Preferably without the behaviours the OP's addressing.

 

I just had to explain to a programmer why its practically impossible to keep any order in the scene hierarchy, as we tried to find a missing prefab which had a collision

 

While I thought your video was a good breakdown of pain points, I really wasn't sure about why you use such a flat hierarchy. You made a passing mention of it being related to performance, but I'm not aware of any performance issues with nesting objects.

There were some older versions of Unity where I think the Hierarchy view would occasionally randomly reorder the top-level objects, but I haven't seen that happening in probably a couple of years.

I feel that organizing objects within my Hierarchy is pretty simple,



What's the reasoning behind not using some basic organization within your scenes? And if you think that the approach I'm using has performance concerns, could you specifically explain those concerns, or how you're quantifying it?

 

I'll quickly butt-in, but the OP can probably answer better than I...

Each game object that needs to be checked or moved, or moved and checked, the system has to go down through the hierarchy and back up, on each object. So in a fast moving game or one with a lot of things moving against one another, the flatter the hierarchy the faster this checking and moving occurs. And this can get to be quite significant.

I'm making a fast arcade game, with lots of interacting and fast moving small objects and medium sized objects. Not quite enough to make it worthwhile using DOTS, but more than enough to be able to show a HUGE difference in performance between a flattened hierarchy versus a carefully groomed and organised nesting hierarchy.

About the only way I've found to solve this from a usability point of view is the using of custom proxy objects for groups of editing that generate the flattened prefabs at startup, otherwise the hierarchy just becomes too busy.

I also nest in the hierarchy, many master objects, and flatten the hierarchy on entering play mode. But this only solves the performance problem, not the editing during play mode.

Just looking at the titles/names of your objects, it's unlikely you're going to be needing this kind of performance consideration, as most everything seems to be static rooms/walls/buildings/furniture in a sort of adventure or third person game.

But if it's possible, make a startup script that flattens the hierarchy and have a look at the difference in profiler time taken on transform duties.

 

That's an interesting finding. Any idea if this performance impact can be seen/quantified in some way in the profiler? My game often has a very high number of rigidbodies flying around, and it would be interesting if I could significantly improve performance if I just SetParent(null) on them all... But I'm curious where that performance difference is measured.

 

I made some rigs a long time ago, and tested it after seeing a Unite video where this was first revealed (to me) and it was so obvious in the amount of time spent on transform updates that I dug into it, forever. It will need to be hundreds or thousands of objects before this matters. They don't all need to be moving, this benefit comes from the checks of contacts, too.

If you've got thousands of things that interact, you'll see it in the frame timings, almost immediately.

Also, watch this, you'll never view Animation Legacy the same again:

 

My profiler pretty much always has a ton of time spent resolving physics contacts, but I always assumed that was just the cost of doing business with rigidbodies. I'll see if transform nesting significantly affects this. Thanks for the lead.

 

I've added a video above, but it boils down to this:

- use static batching
- use flat hierarchies
- use legacy animation
- nest canvases to stop full redraws of whole UI
- pool everything at starts of levels/scenes

And the really ugly one is hack you have to do yourself, tirelessly, all the time:
- master occlusion culling, because Unity sucks at it and limiting overdraw is EVERYTHING!

 

Personally I try to keep a clean folder hierarchy similar to the screenshot (although we naturally have more folders)
However with unity force inserting things at the top, or randomly at the bottom, (not to forget the CTRL+D disaster) and completely ignoring any selecting folders, this only takes 15 minutes of working to completely destroy everything you have ordered and takes always dedicated time to untangle.

I personally try to make things maximum clean, especially in shaders and such, but unity really goes out of its way to really make sure its going to be a mess every time you worked on it.

 

Here is a scene which is maximum compact but you'll see what unity does, every time its the same thing
Mess on both opposite ends. Here its easily overviewable but still, why does it have to throw such wrenches every time. Its so tedious and completely unneceessary.



Hey lets add some at the top but then others at the bottom to make the maximum amount of mess and confusion. In this case its still fixable but then you get the same opposite ends chaos in your subfolders as well, and then if you have this chaos on multiple dimensions you sooner or later just resign and give up, especially once you get to a certain amount of objects.

Edit: Inserted examples how it should be on the first post

 

@dgoyette

you might be able to accomplish the performance test while still retaining you organization if you append categories as either prefix or suffix to the gameobjects.

then can use the search bar to filter, but everything remains un-grouped. Also you won't have to care about things having order swapped around anymore.

 

if you just name things, sure you can find them in the search but their organizatiion will be all over the place and it will look like a giant mess, but thats barely avoidable right now anyways

 

I did some quick tests, and so far I haven't found any meaningful/measureable performance impact of having around 1000 dynamic RBs at scene root versus placing them in various nested transforms down to 6 levels of nesting. Maybe it's just not an issue until the number of RBs gets significantly higher than that, but so far it doesn't seem like a big win to make any changes.

If I do decide to do something like this, I think I'd much prefer an approach where a script on each RB would called SetParent(null) on start. That way, I can keep my scene hierarchy however I want, and only move the RBs to scene root when the game starts.

 

Scenes are definitely meant to be as flat as possible but its been some years since we had done the research and I don't remember exactly the details, but this is definitely a long standing truth as you have to go through all the depth which of course takes cpu cycles

1000 is not exactly much, the scene in the video above has 50000+ transforms
Such theoretical tests also can very easily not show things as in the end in a real production environment you have many things playing together. Maybe your navigation system is really bottlenecked by the amunt of colliders layers deep, adding to loading times, maybe the combination of prefabs and X cause some issues with instancing and batching. There are many factors you can't really test with a quick simulation of a copy pasted object, and in general just best to minimize risks, who knows who does what. (But of course dont go remove all folders, just avoid going many layers deep)

Like Unity Raytracing doing "find object of Type" for 40k objects every frame without memorizing, dropping your FPS to 10. You'll never know what someone did in some implementation somewhere, especially on third party stuff.

 

You're not going to notice it at these volumes of content, nor with RBs.

If you do your own movement and checking of bounds etc with tens of thousands of objects, this will show up super clearly.

RBs have lots of the physics overhead, already, too.

Make 100 parent objects, and under each nest 10, then 10 more under them, then 10 more under them, of cubes. So each cube has a child, which has a child, and there's 100 of them parented by a single transform... and there's a 100 of these. So 100,000 cubes.

Then spin every single cube at any given rate. Then do the same with a flat hierarchy of 100k cubes.

 

Also we still get these random numbers even after perfectly zeroing them at random, just to mess with you

 

Like seriously, what is this

I set all 3 values perfectly to 8 and the other also perfectly rounded
and 1 minute later I get this nonsense.



Also, Unity please. Nobody needs decimals on pixels. If photoshop dosn't need it, then Unity certainly dosn't. Nobody needs sub pixel precision on pixels.

You are really showing off the engine in a bad light in so many cases with these things, its like a hoarders living room, full of chaos and mess, just a terrible look.

 

Also Just look how long it takes for me to select a simple UI element.

13 Seconds recording

13 Full seconds of clicking to get a simple text selected.

You really expect people to click 10 times to get to the thing you need?



I just noticed this since with 2022 LTS a plugin broke which added a clickable icon next to objects on canvas and right click feature to select things easily. The guy probably programmed this in a day.

This complete disregard of basic workflows and complete lack of care is why you get so many complaints.

Its not the "uh we didn't have GI for 10 years" and all that. Its these little things, these basic things which make up 60% of your everyday work. The Editor experience. The Editor is the most core part of the entire engine.

Clicking 10 times on a text element to select it is just inexcusable. Just so awful. But the worst is that it shows that nobody cares and nobody had cared or worked with it for a decade.

---

Edit: Actually this is so simple. How about you prioritize objects at the foremost depth first, not the one which are at the very back? Why on earth would you not click the things on the front first but work yourself up from the very back lowest level?

Imagine you click a 3d character model thats infront of you - would you also make them select the skybox first and make them work towards the front, clouds, mountains, terrain, ground, rocks, grass, and then the character last? Jesus christ people.

 

And another one

I can't read any of these color values

 

A repeated issue is also that Prefab overrides are hallucinated in and come out of nowhere but also don't do anything
Sometimes I get like 20 overrides which just do nothing and when removed instantly reappear

 

I've been come under the "have you filed a bug report" default response for pointing this out. They must know, and know the cause, but waylay it by pretending its on us to notify them of it via official channels, so they can then move to "how many votes has this issue got" etc.

 

On a Mac, using the Mac Color Editor for HDR... changes to luminance slider aren't accurately made until after moving the colour within the gradient. Which is insanely annoying for colour grading and artistic/creative settings iterations within levels. etc.

 

I constantly get these kind of prefab overrides which in reality have no override
In this prefab there were like 4-5 of such non overrides

 

This. I've got thousands of these throughout my project since upgrading. I know nothing is changed in them. I'm a diligent and disciplined Nested Prefabs user.

 

People in the team keep complaining about the many things, especially the non loading prefab icons are still an issue on LTS

 

chill out guys- we're getting raytraced hair on the next cinematic showcase! sure, none of the tools made for the new cinematic will work out of the box with Unity but at least the shareholders will be happy! won't someone think of the shareholders???

 

This here is also super annoying
I cant see my icons since Unity dosnt properly load the larger sizes
Waiting a long time or changing the size slider does nothing.

 

Also importantly, when you have an object that is at x 0.536 and you turn on grid snapping on 2m, moving it with snapping should snap it to the grid, not simply increment the current number.
Right now that would equal to 2.536, 4.536 and so on, but you would want 2, 4, 6 etc.


I noticed the unity team did some very commendable improvements for 2022.3+ LTS it seems.
+ You can now copy something in another object and have it zeroed.
+ Copying a object into another parent keeps the position intact
+ Ctrl-D now inserts at the position below!
+ There is a setting to have objects spawn in 0,0 in the scene
+ Creating a object into a parent has it spawn at 0,0
+ Dragging a prefab in a parent spawns it at 0,0 wow!
Probably even more things. Very nice!

 

I got Hierarchy 2 (continued as Hierarchy 4 in Asset store but now paid) There's also more advanced solutions in the asset store but Hierarchy 2 does offer some relief, one or 2 bugs but it is free!