2018.2.0b2 hidpi test and some issues. Ubuntu 18.04

Unity Engine
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I tried 2018.2.0b2 specifically to test the high dpi support and its working pretty well. Lack of high dpi scaling of the editor is my current pain point on my main project. I have not tried too much with this 2018 beta version yet. I have only created a new project and added some UI objects to the scene before bumping into some issues.

What works well:

  • High dpi. Fonts and UI features are a nice size and finally readable, Thank you! There were a few minor pixel artefacts (bars) between some of the text character combinations on project create screen. For example, there is a small coloured bar in the word “Project” between the ‘c’ and the ‘t’ characters, and also if I type the project name as “hidpi” then between the ‘p’ and the ‘i’ characters). This is only minor and it only seems to happen on that one dialog box screen.

What has issues:

  • Scrolling Behaviour. Scrolling some UI panels using touchpad two finger scrolling gesture seems to make the UI get stuck and bounce back and forth. Mainly an issue with the “Unity Preferences” panels such as “Colors” and “Keys”. Using a real mouse wheel or the scroll bar UI handles works fine though. Note that I use the laptop touchpad as my primary mouse input as i’m not always at a desk. This has always worked fine and still does in 2017.x.

  • Scene View Zoom. The scene view zoom only seems to go forward into the scene no matter which way I scroll using touchpad two finger scrolling gesture. This works fine with a real mouse wheel. This also works fine with the touchpad gesture in 2017.x.

  • Maximised Window. The Unity Editor window appears to go into maximised mode when a project is loaded with no option to not be maximised. It is actually going underneath the default system app launcher unlike normal maximised windows. I usually run Unity maximised when it works correctly, but for this I need to move the window to the side to access the area under the app launcher. I tried to resize the window by dragging the window border edges, but it will never let me make it smaller, only larger each time.

My machine specs for reference:

  • Ubuntu 18.04 (Gnome 3.28.1, X11 desktop session)

  • Dell XPS 15 9560

  • 4k display with 200% scaling

  • Nvidia 390.48 drivers

Thanks Unity team for your hard work bringing the editor to Linux.

1 Like
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I also tried 2018.2.0b2. How are you scaling your fonts? I don’t use any general desktop scaling, and the only way I found to scale Unity’s UI was with GDK_SCALE, which only appears to accept integral values.

I can confirm the window maximization problem. Actually, for me, the editor originally opened in a smaller window, but I can only increase the size of the window – like you, I can grab the window edge, but it doesn’t “take” if I try to make the window smaller.

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I use the built in system settings scale option set to 200%. Every other app works fine with that setting. I didn’t apply anything extra to make it work for Unity 2018.2.0b2, it seems to pickup the system scale value correctly. In Unity 2017.3.1f1 everything is really tiny.

I will try 2018.1.0f2 later tonight and see if it also has the scrolling issue.

4

I re-tested Unity 2018.2.0b2 with GDK_SCALE=1 to force non hidpi mode. The scrolling of preference panels and zooming in the scene view is still broken, and the font artefacts are still in the project creation dialog screen.

I did some testing of Unity 2018.1.0f2 and it has the same font artefacts as 2018.2.0b2, but the scrolling of preference panels and zooming in scene view works perfectly in this version. Some change has definitely broken that in the newer beta version.

5

From what I can tell, the editor only pays attention to the window scaling settings, and not the global font scaling settings. So, on gnome-shell 3.28, you can set the window scaling via Settings > Devices > Display to 200%, and that will affect the editor. But if you use gnome-tweaks and set the font setting, which does accept non-integral values, that is ignored.

Since gnome does not support fractional general scaling (and probably won’t anytime soon), using the global scaling and ignoring the font scaling appears, to me, to be a more limiting choice.

6

This is likely an artifact of having migrated to gtk3 then, along with the window resizing behavior; we’ll address it.

This is maybe an artifact of CEF handling scaling in its own special way.

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For reference, I have have tested these issues with the new 2018.2.0b7 and can confirm that window resizing and touchpad scrolling is now fixed.