hey - had a search around the forum, couldn’t find much on this… but is it easy to extend the editor? Perhaps adding a custom menu/tools form etc…
A quick example, an in-editor ambient occlusion baker, or if you wrote a portal/cell scenemanagement system you’d want tools for designers/artists to interface with this.
Are there many people out there doing this?
Even simple little things… it could become like 3dsMax with the huge amount of 3rd party scripts that help in little ways.
Cheers!
We have been making a tonne of editor scripts, and it’s fairly easy to do. Problem is a lot are very specific to our pipeline so wouldn’t be much else to others, but we would like to release them in the future if we feel they would be useful to people. For example we have just finished writing a mission editor, but the missions obviously pipe into our game code, which we can’t really release for obvious reasons.
For light mapping, check here.
Check the Editor classes in the scripting manual. They should link you through to plenty of info about extending the editor.
Yup, a lot of people make Unity editor scripts to streamline their workflows. The ease with which the Unity editor can be extended is one of the things that makes it rather special IMO.
ok, cool - thanks for the answers…
though you both mention ‘scripts’, does this still mean tool windows? For example, you might want to create a rail-cam game and will need custom tool windows with buttons, text field entries… etc
That lightmapping one looks allright… I wrote a similar tool to work with gile which had the added benefit of being free if you don’t have Max licenses 
- but that was for a different engine, I may well consider doing that again if we push ahead far enough with a Unity project!
Cheers!
Look on the wiki in the script section under “editor scripts” for some examples. The Unity user interface itself is implemented using the Unity GUI functions…pretty much anything you see in Unity can be done with editor scripts, because everything IS, in fact, an editor script.
–Eric
I use editor scripts in my everyday work.
And I know many other people who do the same.
Editor scripts are extremely useful!
Our GUI-eXtended (GUIX) product is currently deployed as an editor extension:
http://www.ennanzus-interactive.com/developer/GUIX/
Once you get the hang of some of the quirks of the Unity editor and its API, nearly anything is possible within your skill level.
Your best bet is to spend some time adding simple extensions to the editor, and ramp up the difficulty as you go. As already mentioned, the wiki has some useful scripts you can look through to learn how to do certain things.
-Jeremy