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

In A.D. 2101
Unite was beginning.

HELGASON : What happen ?

TESTER : Somebody set up us the crash.

DEVELOPER : We get signal.

HELGASON : What !

DEVELOPER : Main screen turn on.

HELGASON: It's you !!

BUGS : How are you gentlemen !!

BUGS : All your GUI are belong to us.

BUGS: You are on the way to destruction.

HELGASON : What you say !!

BUGS : You have no chance to release make your time.

BUGS : Ha ha ha ha ....

 

Looks like they released a beta version: http://unity3d.com/unity/beta/4.6

 

In the keynote they announced that the GUI code will be open source.

 

Yes, new GUI is both available now (Public Beta) and it is Open Source.

 

Finally!!!

http://unity3d.com/unity/beta/4.6

 

http://isthenewguioutyet.com/

http://unity3d.com/unity/beta/4.6

 

Unity 4.6 Beta seems pretty stable.

 

So is there any specific place one could post questions/inconvenience/feedbacks about the new UI?

I'll do it here in the meantime. I'm messing with events, and there's two things I'm not quite sure I'm a fan of.

1. If you want to have a handler for say, a pointer enter event for a button, your handler must take a BaseEventData as an argument as opposed to PointerEventData because the functions list won't detect it - So say you wanted to fetch the pointerId or anything related, you'd have to cast it down to a PointerEventData. Redundant, and not very intuitive.
   
2. I'm not quite sure how to receive right/middle mouse buttons. The OnPointerClick/Up/Down don't seem to catch anything but left clicks.

 

Vexe.. right there:
http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/developer-preview-4-6-beta.60/

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/developer-preview-4-6-beta.60/

 

There's a whole dedicated forum section for it, nice. Thanks both.

 

Play with Unity 4.6. The most annoying thing is anchors system.
1. I can't disable them if i would like to.
2. I can't make my widget to have absolute left offset and relative right offset.

When i working on layout system for my project i think a lot about how to implement it. And what i got now:

LayoutObject - component that contains information about size of the object(also min/max limits of the object), padding, and references to left/top/right/bottom anchors.
LayoutAnchor - component that have type(enum {Left, Right, Top, Bottom, MiddleVertical, MiddleHorizontal}), value(offset) and valueMode(enum {absolute, relative}) + methods to calculate is final position and list of objects to notify when parent layoutObject change size or position.

When LayoutObject change size or position its notify all LayoutObjects that is linked to its anchors. Many LayoutObjects can be linked to one anchor and its doesn't know about context where its appear. Its right to do so because child GUI element should't know about how they should behave inside parent element, only parent GUI element can change layout by changing anchor values. And i think its SOLID way to layout.

In Unity 4.6 i can bind many elements to one "anchor" but i have to create some extra GameObject(+1 GameObject, +1 RectTransform with lot of properties) that will increase runtime overhead, asset size, and loading time...

 

Anchors are a difficult thing to get right in a UI system because there are many ways of doing them. For instance, I really don't like the way NGui does anchors. But some people are cool with them. Hopefully UT got a result that pleases most people, because it's going to be a very difficult thing to change post-release.

Most layout systems operate in a top-down fashion. But many popular systems (html, flex, NGui, DFGui) also support bottom-up layout features as well. Sometimes the parent size is dependent on the size of the children.

 

Any way if i would like to make my own layout system UT should expose ability to disable default anchors at all...

 

One thing I found a bit tricky, is changing the width/height of a UI element from code. I really didn't know which property is relevant but I noticed in the RectTransform sometimes there's 'width'/'height' written or top/left, etc - There was no width/height properties code-wise - So I wanted to know what values they're displaying in their editor so I took at a peek at their RectTransform editor and saw that it's 'deltaSize' - It turns out that depending on your anchor/parent configuration, this size could act as width/height or an offset. Not very straight forward, nor counter-intuitive. I'd be nice if there's a straight-forward way to manipulate the width/height directly.

 

Again, I think it's best to discuss this in the Developer Preview section.