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

I don't like NGUI. It creates a mess of components in the hierarchy for making a simple button. I hope the new GUI will be completelly integrated and less complex.

 

Hey this thread is funny.

 

Can't belive that S*** ! You ppl are really excited because they are changing the GUI !? I mean, what tha...... What is so exciting about it? That you have to learn using Unity again? Come on.... -_-

 

So I take it you've never used the current Unity GUI? I take it you've never had your draw calls skyrocket because of how terrible it is? I take it you've never actually tried to make a UI with its exceptionally clunky code implementation?

 

Well, well. It's about time!

 

Does anyone know if the immediate mode GUI will be deprecated? If not, will it be able to take advantage of at least some of new features in the new GUI?

 

It should be deprecated, shot, burned at the stake, blown up, and thrown in a volcano in Mordor where it came from.

But I would be surprised if they remove it, it would break a lot of existing games.

 

So you won't like the new GUI also. It does just the same.
Each GUI element is an object on hierarchy.

 

While the base concepts are the same, it does reduce the complexity quite a bit.

For example, lets say you want to make a button.

In NGUI, you needed a parent game object, then 2 game objects inside one for the background and one for the text. You need several components such as UIButtonScale, UIAnchor, UIButtonSound, UIButtonColor, BoxCollider, UIButtonMessage, and some additional component if you want navigation with a controller. In the inside objects you need UILabel and UISprite.

In the new GUI, you need 2 objects, the parent, containing a UIButton and a UISprite, and a child containing a UILabel, that is it. It is functionally equivalent. If you want other animations, the gap is even bigger.

NGUI focuses on making small reusable components, which is fine, but you end up with a huge amount of components and game objects. The new GUI focuses on being easy to use, and make the common case as simple as possible, while allowing you to do more complex stuff.

Suppose you want to do something when the button is clicked.

In NGUI, you open the UIButtonMessage, put in a target object and type the name of the message. You cannot have several objects listening to the button event click, and you would have to know what the name of the method you want to call is. Also, it is not type safe.
In the new GUI, you drag in an object you want to call, it figures out what components and methods are available, and you just select which one you want to call. You can have as many listeners as you want. It is just much simpler.

 

NGUI does have that same functionality now; you can drag an object and it will give you a drop down of matching methods on each component, and you can have multiple listeners. I'm guessing a lot of the newer stuff in NGUI is straight from the new Unity GUI.

 

Ohh, that is good to know. We have not upgraded NGUI because it is a big effort and we would rather wait for the new GUI and switch to that.

 

The entire editor is built on that, so of course it won't be deprecated. It's perfectly good for some things.

--Eric

 

Indeed, it's FANTASTIC for building custom inspectors (in an environment which performance isn't crucial)

 

I can clearly see why it won't be deprecated anytime soon. But let's be honest about this one: it isn't particularly good for anything. As an Rhich Client Platform user interface (which is required by the editor), it can't match things like GEF (yes, I know that is Java, not Mono/.NET but you get the idea). As a Game UI framework, well... I think we all know why it did not get much love there, either.

So what is it good for, then?


UI toolkits are always a difficult matter. So far, in quite a lot of years in active development, I've seen only ONE combination of tools that makes UI remotely acceptable: Java + Swing + Eclipse's Window Builder Pro + MigLayout. And that's for desktop applications. Things get even MORE complex when it comes to games, because in addition to be functional, they are required to look good and moreover *unique*. You can't get away with a standard skin in a real game. For that reason... I don't see any *real* solution to the problem of Game UI any time soon, because it is a theoretical as well as a practical problem. I'm ready to be convinced otherwise by the new UI system, though

 

Come on, there are plenty of use cases where it's handy.

Off the top of my head, simple custom editors are a snap to whip up and it's great to be able to add OnGUI() { // stuff } to an arbitrary MonoBehaviour and easily print debug stuff on the screen. If targeting PC as a platform there's some cases where I think using OnGUI could actually be more productive than NGUI, too (though they're not particularly common use cases, and they're not things I do often with Unity).

It's far from ideal, but that's not the same as not being good for anything.

 

I would love to be able to use the new GUI for custom editors, hopefully that will be supported.

 

Can you explain what the benefit of the new GUI will be for custom editors?

For games, it will certainly rock because for games, I want fancy stuff with lots of nice looking sprites, fancy fonts, interesting animations and so on and so on. But for custom editors what I really want is a clean look that's consistent with the rest of the Unity editor. And I want to be able to create the GUI directly from code and not have to build a scene just to get those properties changed.

 

I like having the scene view for making my 3d game. I would hate it if I had to do everything in code

I like having the animation editor, I would _really_ hate it if I had to do the curves by code.

I like having the animator view, I would hate it if I had to do a FSM by code.

I hate having to do my GUI by code. I would rather do it in a visual editor just like the new GUI provides.

But addressing the custom editors specifically, I have had lots of problem laying out stuff in custom editors. Things for me often end up out of screen and impossible to reach.

Moreover, I really dislike the API. It is not object oriented, so it feels out of place in C# and Unity's rather nice component model. It forces you to mix presentation with logic. The methods require tons of parameters which make them really verbose for simple things. It is very limited, it lacks widgets like tabs and links and they are not trivial to add. Out of the dozen or so GUI APIs I have used in my life, it is my least favorite one after win32.

But I hope this does not turn into some flame war, this is just my opinion, I would use the new GUI if it was available for custom editors _and_ was easy to use. If you like IMGUI, more power to you.

 

You won't be able to use the new GUI for custom editors or other editor GUI.

 

Wait.
If there is a 4.6, where are 4.4 and 4.5?

 

4.4 was released (for people doing console publishing), 4.5 isn't out yet.

--Eric

 

Actually, all Wii U developers are still stuck at 4.2.

 

I'm really disappointed that Unity is not going to provide nice C# events for GUI objects and force object-oriented developers like me to use all their stupid SendMessage stuff...

 

Really? Where did you get that information?

 

I am interested too, because I read nowhere that it is going to be based on SendMessage. It was announced to have another event like solution!

 

http://blog.devgamm.com/en/2014/announce-unity-devgamm/
http://devgamm.com/moscow2014/en/conference/sessions/

We will soon have a look at the new GUI.

 

Hmmm, that sounds like they'll be no 4.5, only 4.6 and by mid May?

 

Not sure how you came to that conclusion.

--Eric

 

Oh, I've read one too many thread in Unity Gossip is all.

 

I hope they'll also announce the new prefab system!!!

 

Really? You subscribe to events through inspector. This is their "new event system". No delegates :cry:

 

I dont think you do, if you did u would clearly know 4.5 is being prepared and in beta testing.

 

unity 4.6 is in beta 7, testing over 4.5?

 

Being prepared for what? RC release or general release? You're right I do think and I've known 4.5 is in beta for a very long time now.

 

I hope it's a generic event system that's available for general purpose use. I don't like this thing where everyone and their dog has their own favorite event system...

 

I have heard about a new GUI, is there any info on what it will be like?

 

As it is based on NGUI, it is probably going to be at least comparable NGUI.

 

I cannot comment, Graham could possible explain..Information was obtained from the Unity 5 thread in Announcements.

 

The uGUI is just what you expect of a GUI. simply easy, beautiful, and you can simply create any control with it.

 

How do you know this?

BTW, is that the new GUI has a sort of converter to recover the 'old' GUI Skin?

 

beta tester maybe ..

 

No. The OnGUI system and uGUI are going to be completely different systems, and fundamentally incompatible. You will probably be able to re-use the art assets created for the OnGUI system, but that's about as far as you'll be able to go.

 

Thanks for the reply.

@Giyomu
Hi guy.

 

This needs to hurry up. It's a GUI system, not a space station.

 

This needs to hurry up. It's software development, not world peace talks.

... I can only imagine a Unity engineer seeing this comment and acting "Oh well, we've been sitting on it doing nothing, I guess we should release it now"... sigh.

I know.. I fed the troll...

 

If I remember correctly, the entire construction time of the ISS was less than the development time of Duke Nukem Forever (to which this GUI system has been explicitly compared). So "space station" may not be the best choice for this comparison

 

@PolishRenegade if this leads to another stupid discussion, it's clearly going to be your fault!

 

I guess I was looking for a fight. It's so darn tempting to pick them sometime... And it's Monday. You should always be allowed to rant on Mondays, by Law

Guess the meme game:
- You've been postponing dev. for an unreleased feature for an on-going project? You're doing it wrong.
- If you trust software development estimates and timelines... You're going to have a bad time.
- Some feature you want is not out yet... You can't explain that!
- Developers work faster when people complain about them. FALSE! They are always doing their best.
- The amount of self-entitled customers... Is too damn high!
- What if I told you that it will be released when its ready?
- This thread is bad, and you should feel bad.