Unity 4.6 with new GUI system to be released this spring!?

hidden in Unity 5 FAQ we find

http://unity3d.com/unity/faq

did someone says this spring?

 

I believe it! They said it's F***ing close!

 

Best news today Really looking forward to the update

 

countdown (end of spring, summer starts)
http://days.to/summer/2014

 

Yeah I'll believe it when I see it. They said the same thing back in 3.x version and it never happened then they backed out and said they never said any such thing.

 

It really is going to happen this time.

 

Awwwww, but I was just getting used to clicking on the "is the new gui out yet dot com" link every day

 

The talk on the new GUI just finished at GDC. It is so much simpler now. I love the new anchoring system and the event system.

No wonder they have not released it yet, they really moved away from NGUI, it almost looks like a rewrite compared to what they demoed last year.

That said, it is clearly not there yet. It looks very solid, but it still lacks some components such as input box and scroll views.

Can't wait to get my hands on it.

 

I'm just going to point out, the Spring thing was an error on the site, it's actually summer. Sorry for the mishap.

 

I hate it when websites convert the text to a completely different word.

 

Yeah yeah, pull the other one.

 

And in a couple of months we read

Really that thing is like Duke Nukem Forever
Hopefully it does not turn out like Duke Nukem Forever.

 

Hopefully it does, but only in the sense that every time a button event occurs, the editor just goes "Shake it, baby!"

 

Haha yeah!

 

Tell us more!

 

You start creating a canvas as a top level object, the canvas can be in world space or in screen space. Use screen space for full screen gui, and world space for 3d gui or in game gui.

Then in the canvas, you add a game object with a sprite to make a window. The sprite can be a regular unity sprite that gets packed into an atlas.
The sprite is sliced into 9 regions, the corners are not stretched, so it does not matter what the window size is, the borders look right.

Then inside the window object, you add buttons, text, etc.

GUI objects don't have a Transform. Instead they have a Rect Transform. This rect transform has a built in anchor functionality relative to the parent object. This is why you make the button a child of the window.

You anchor stuff to any value between (0,0) and (1,1). (0,0) is the top left corner, (1,1) is the bottom right corner, (.5, .5) is the center of the window.

Suppose you anchor the top left and bottom left of an object to (0,0), and the top right and bottom right to (1,0), then the object stretches with the parent window. Each corner of an object can be anchored independently.

Lets say you want a button at the bottom center. add an object, anchor all corners to (0.5, 1) and move it where you want it. Add a sprite component to it with the button background. Then inside of that object, add another object, add a text component and anchor it to the center of the button.

Components have events, that you declare as a field. The component can invoke the event at any time.
Then in the editor, you click on the event, select an object, component and method you want it to call. You can add as many listeners to that event as you want.

A component can call animations, and these are the regular Unity animations, so when you move your mouse over a button , it will play an animation that scales the button. You can even animate the anchor, so you can have a button fly in and anchor to the center of the window.

Then there is some stuff for layouts, like grids, or aligning things vertically and horizontally.

They also showed an hypertext component that could render text with links and some text effects. You can listen to the click event to react to links.

It looks very intuitive and simple. It is a big improvement over NGUI and integrates beautifully with other features from unity. I am really looking forward to 4.6 now . Perhaps when the RDF wears off I won't be as excited lol.

 

Everything sounds awesome, I can't wait, I can't f* wait!! Okay, a couple of questions:
The text effects you mean are shadows, strokes and gradient?
In game gui that you say in the beginning could be those speech bubbles?
I don't know if you'll be able to answer this but, what if I had an array list of a custom class for my items, would be hard to instantiate buttons inside that grid with the correct icon, item name, and etc?

 

Can I define the corner dimensions? For instance, could I define them like this?

 

Well you could do that with NGUI already if you set the top right corner to the same width as the bottom right corner.

 

I've actually been running an in-house GUI solution of my own. At this point it's not worth the cost of upgrading to NGUI since I have something that fits my needs for the time being, but a free in-engine feature could nicely supersede the limited system I've implemented,

 

The new GUI system is based on NGUI so therefore should manage the above window display, although multiple colliders might be required to match the shape.

 

Well... while defining that would certainly be possible, how would you expect it to behave? Considering that the sizing works by manipulating verts and UVs on a plane if there's asymmetrical regions like you've got there then that has to result in some kind of non-uniform stretching in one of the regions. No problem if you're using flat colours, but for texture or gradients?

 

Shouldn't be easier to just put an extra sprite down there?

 

I use flats/things that stretch uniformly along their axes as it is now. I just whipped that together in like 5 seconds and really only added the noise because it helped break up the uniformity of the colour.

 

Can you use units other than UV (0.0 - 1.0) for positioning? i.e. pixel precision placement.

 

It also broke up the example.

Anyway, as it would add "but if's" to the workflow I think Rodolfo has the right of it...

... which happens to be how I do this kind of stuff at the moment, too. It's a more robust solution that doesn't add pitfalls to the workflow.

 

That's interesting, since it implies that the whole thing was scrapped since the NGUI developer was working on it? I'm pretty sure he's said in the past that when he came onto the job he started by using the then-current version of NGUI.

 

awesome news! I am really looking forward to the new gui system coming to unity. Guess I will hold off on buying NGUI for now.
So does anyone know if the new gui system will make creating universal gui's for different screen resolutions much simpler?

 

Draw two horizontal lines and two vertical lines. That will divide your sprite in 9 slices. The corners are not scaled in any way. The top and bottom slices are only stretched horizontally, the left and right slices are only stretched vertically, and the center slice will be stretched both vertically and horizontally.

In the example you give, the right side slice should be big enough to cover the bottom tab.

The slicing is optional, you can set it to just stretch the sprite if you like.

 

There are no colliders. It seems that they use the Rect Transform to detect the extents of a game object. This seems very different from NGUI.

 

From the presentation in GDC, while you can tell that it is based on NGUI, they have really moved away from it. They made a clear effort to make it simpler to use and more integrated with existing tools (Animator, sprites). I would say it is _losely_ based on NGUI at this point.

 

The hypertext component they demoed had text color, links, and italics. I am sure they have a few more options than that. I am not sure if the hypertext component came with unity or it was a third party component they were demoing.

The regular text component could do 2 effects: shadow or outline, that is it. It would be great if they add other effects.

The in game gui they demoed was a speech bubble. Essentially you can add a gui anywhere in your scene, it does not have to face the camera.

I don't really understand the question, but I don't think they went into enough detail to answer this.

 

As in the words of Beavis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCIhwknRKzk

 

The HyperText component will not be included with Unity. It was made by Adam Mechtley, who's on our closed alpha/beta lists and have been testing the GUI. He gave us permission to show off the component in the presentation. It was shown to demonstrate how the API makes it possible to create custom components.

 

The normal text component will have the normal rich text formatting options, as well as a simplistic shadow (just offset; no blur) and stroke (just the text offset in four directions; only works for very thin strokes). We'd have liked to provide something better, but for version one it's either this or no effects at all, since we just don't have the time to implement a more sophisticated and complete effects system for the first version.

Not very hard, no. This is the intended use case. You'll basically instantiate a prefab of yours for each element, and modify text or images in the instance according to your data. Then you'll add your prefab as a child to the grid GameObject and add it to the list of elements in the grid component.

 

Is that it? That sounds really basic. Those are things you can do or almost do with the current GUITextures/GUITexts.

How about the concept of floating? Can I create floating objects that act like floating divs in html?
How about metrics? Can I query these objects about how wide they will be based on inputed text/markup?
Support for inline elements? Can I add images or text-rects that will appear inline with the text of my parent element?
Are there any concepts like stylesheets or inheritance?
Are there any way of making shapes using vectorized graphics?
Can I render an GUI-element using a custom shader? Is the currently used shader openly available, so it's easy to write a custom one?
How is the underlying script support?

The above are things I definitely assumed would be in the new GUI, in one way or another. There are more of course, but those were the things I thought or right away.

What you are talking about; the concept of borders and anchoring, that's what they have been showing every time they have had a "new GUI", and really, it really isn't anything impressive at all.

I really hope there's more to this, otherwise I am deeply disappointed.

 

I had thought it would work with 9 slice by just duplicating and tiling the "middle" slice, or like tiling vertically to "left" and "right", "middle" slices, while dupicating the "top" and "bottom" horizontally to avoid ruining textured GUI elements. But maybe I can only hope for such a thing... if that all makes sense haha

EDIT doesnt ragepixel function like that?

 

So if 4.6 is to be released this Spring then it will be released somewhere between March 20, 2014 and June 21, 2014 and before 4.6 is released they will release 4.5!

So, we're talking 4.6 will be released sometime in the next 4 months!

 

4.5 already came out, but it was specifically for console deployment, I believe.

 

in the morning they say "spring" and in the afternoon they say "summer"
I think.. No one knows when come out..

I am very very very disappointed

Ngui is one man team .. Ngui developer work for forum, tutorial, document, QA.. and other games..
I hated ngui but now I think NGUI deverloper is super Genius
Without him.. How difficult was this time? He is my hero..

without him There is no ugui. We should not forget his contribution

 

No, that was 4.4.

--Eric

 

http://nooooooooooooooo.com/

 

Yes

 

As one of the beta testers, we've been working with uGUI for a while now, and I can report that not only is it happening for real, it's shaping up very nicely indeed. We used an early beta in our Character Studio. That has given us the confidence to embark on implementing the entire game UI refresh using uGUI in the coming weeks. Because uGUI is still in beta, we do of course have a fallback.

When uGUI arrives in Unity 4.6 there will be a lot of smiling faces.

 

I've been waiting a LONG time for the new GUI. And, the timing on its release will be perfect - cause I have a major new project starting soon, and it now falls in the 5.0 upgrade cycle. Being patient let me skip directly from 3.x to 5.0, get the UI as soon as soon as it's released, and save a nice chunk of change!

WOOT!

Gigi

 

So, I was just looking at the currently featured asset in the Unity store. It says, "Requires Unity 4.6.0 or higher". The download page unfortunately still lists 4.3.4 as the latest. (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/15334)

 

Unity 4.6.0 is in beta for quite some time now. The publisher likely submitted this asset with the beta version, what should never ever happen...

 

Well the new Unity GUI, plus the updated NGUI once the developer updates it to make use of the new Unity GUI, and the Daikon Forge GUI once it's updated to make good use of the new Unity GUI and then we have something useful on a case by case basis. I'm looking for a way to easily integrate the GUI into game play flow and not some screen blocking - obscuring halt to the game with every little thing.

... and it's not that the old Unity GUI wasn't useful and good but I have thousands of lines of code just to create a seemingly simple GUI with that.