Enough is Enough.

Unity Editor
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Hello Unity Community,

I wanted to share some important concerns I’ve noticed regarding recent developments in the Unity Editor. In this post, I’ll address areas where I believe Unity needs to put in more effort to achieve its goals of providing a user-friendly experience.

Firstly, regarding the development of the editor, I’ve observed that progress has been slower than expected lately. There seems to be uncertainty about the timelines for announcements of new features and fixes, making it difficult for developers to plan. A more predictable development roadmap could help the community better plan and meet their needs.

Another significant point is the frequent shelving of promises made to developers. While we get excited about features and improvements, it’s disappointing to see them ignored in the next update. This makes it harder for developers to feel confident and disrupts their future planning.

Lastly, the issue of not innovatively changing the editor theme should be addressed. While it’s important not to change the interface that users are familiar with, I believe there’s a need for a radical change. Bold steps need to be taken to improve the user experience, perhaps by adopting a modern design language.

Let’s take a moment to consider and compare previous Unity editors with Unity 6 editor side by side; is there a significant difference in terms of user-friendliness? Honestly, after the name change to Unity 6 was announced, I was expecting a completely different editor. When I downloaded the beta version, I found myself questioning if I had accidentally opened the 2022 version, and once again, it was disappointing. :slight_smile:

For example, I’m sharing an image from Unity’s official blog post titled “Evolving the Unity Editor,” published in 2019. However, it’s been 5 years since that post, and there has been no update regarding this development.

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The Improved, Searchable Context Menus under development is unexpectedly removed from the roadmap. The reason given is something absurd like falling below expected quality. It’s a joke; how can this innovation manage to fall short of quality? What is needed, does Unity expect to purchase it after someone develops and shares this innovation? (Like Text Mesh Pro) And on an unrelated note, but seriously, the name ‘Text Mesh Pro’ sounds so funny and amateurish

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Currently, some developers prefer Unity more due to reasons such as extensive online resources and a larger community in the mobile gaming sector compared to alternatives. But what about 2-3 years from now? :slight_smile:

Thank you,

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Same situation as “500ms”. Unity attracted the attention they wanted and now it’s being forgotten.

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Definitely! It no longer surprises me that such promises are not kept. But now seeing experimental packages and D.O.T.S. makes me sick.

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It’s good to see those long-term bugs are getting fewer as we getting closer to Unity 6 during with beta.

Unity 6 is just rebranded 2023.3 LTS, so let’s consider it as a beginning of future updates without chasing the yearly cycle, instead of something out of box brand new.

I hope the user interface can keep the same (Same location, Same item name, Same Icon), but maybe they can update the UI style to make it a bit new look, but after all, it’s a production tool, it is not a game, the looks is the last thing to consider, the steability and performance is more important.

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What I’m talking about is definitely not the beauty of design. I’m talking about user-friendly design. I’m talking about design that will make our work easier

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Example(s)?

Roadmaps are inherently vague. Relying on X to appear at date Y for any software product that is NOT under your control is risky to begin with, but it’s naive to do so when you have neither control nor insights into the development and decision making processes.

Example(s)? Besides the “context menu” thing.

Why?

About the only UX thing that’s been plaguing Unity forever and needs fixing is the Asset Create menu. Unity 6 has cleaned that up quite nicely but only by means of organizing the menu, but it’s still a three-levels deep context menu with too many items overall.

You and nobody else. :stuck_out_tongue:
Nobody expects a completely different editor because … what would be the point?
This sort of flashy “it’s all new” but only on the surface change is almost guaranteed to be a complete disaster (ask Microsoft :smile:).

It would also increase friction among existing users which are likely over 90% of the Unity 6 userbase. This would slow adoption rate of Unity 6 which would be the last thing Unity wanted since they already have introduced friction due to the runtime fee coming into effect with Unity 6.

I’m happy for the continuous improvements, like the build profiles window. All these little changes don’t deter one from upgrading and most of them are very welcome. A complete overhaul would be nothing short of madness. Consider that most people don’t like radical changes. They make us feel uneasy, uncomfortable. Some even get angry. Fight or flight reactions all around, no matter how “modern” it may look on the surface.

It may not look exactly like that, but if you compare screenshots of Unity 6 (2023) with Unity 2018/2019 you will certainly notice various GUI changes and that it looks “more modern” whatever that may be.

For instance, the dockable scene view toolbars, dockable to all four sides as shown in that screenshot are there. Floating, expandable overlay menus also exist but remain somewhat underutilized and aren’t as transparent, perhaps because it has been shown that they don’t work so well after all since they can only float inside the scene view, covering parts of the scene.

Which is subjective. But do consider that you could consider it an amateur product, because that’s what it was initially. It was originally an asset published on the store until Unity bought it and hired the developer. :wink:

Then provide concrete examples, at least point out the things where “our work” is made unnecessarily hard. If you have ideas on how to improve those workflows, do share them.

Just keep in mind: the editor has to work well for all developers, on Windows, Mac and Linux and their respective user’s expectations of how an app is supposed to look and feel like. Then it has to work for all workflows, 2D or 3D, Terrain or Physics, Programmer or Artist, and for all platforms, for projects big and small.

Compromises are to be expected, but hey … custom editor tooling has been and remains one of Unity’s strongest points, particularly for professionals. :wink:

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I just want to have a Unity editor that lets me open an example scene and then switch some higher level tab for workflow back to my main scene, where I think that picture in OP post kind of shows it as tabs for ‘WorldBuilding’, ‘Animation’ etc… , so workflow tabs that let you open entirely different scenes where the other tabs like hierarchy/project reflect where you are with those scenes separately from another workflow tab… basically I just hate having to open another Unity project just to look at an assets demo examples etc… while still having my main Unity project open to switch between and compare scene differences etc, as you just can’t open 2 or more scenes in the editor seperate in there own editor scene tab, most you can do is load them all in one single hierarchy scene view over the top of another scene… just messy to work like that disabling scenes/conflicting stuff… so would be nice to just have Unity editor improved to support this sort of workflow within the Editor.

Must have been something that has been talked about before, other than that I don’t care for any major theming/ changes other than cleanup and redesign of some sort in the settings/options, look at UE’s it’s not bad I was surprised

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That UI looks amazing,

Unity, please use some of those billions and make this UI proposal concept design a reality!

please!

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The editor needs a facelift. That’s for sure. It’s quite the mess, especially when you get into SRP settings.

Funny, were it not for DOTS I’d have changed to Unreal a long time ago. Entities, Jobs and Burst is fantastic. How that can make you “sick” is beyond me.

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Flat hierarchy and Agile methods combined with inexperienced team members can have that effect.

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I wish the interface looked exactly like in that screenshot you posted. The current Editor still looks like it’s stuck in the 2000s and I hate it. At this point the entire interface needs a complete redesign to bring it up to modern standards.

I completely disagree that the looks are the last thing that should be considered. For me they are hugely important. If I’m looking at a software for hours on end, and the software looks like a cobbled together debugging tool, I don’t even want to work with it anymore. I’m looking at that mock-up and feel inspired. But then I open Unity and it feels like I just booted up Windows 98.

I want to see a complete overhaul of the main interface. Scrap everything, build it back up from the ground while keeping the functionality. This has been one of my major gripes with Unity for the last decade.

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The interface looked better when it had the OSX styling…even on windows… it went down hill in style after changing from that to what it is now… is nothing about that screenshot above that says it’s better… its just flat bland boring… gradients were good, I don’t care what anyone says against them. An old gif anyway it’s more about the layout and ux functionality… I’m still wondering why we have to use third party addons for the Hierarchy to get better functionality, or even in the project window hasn’t never had a functionality improvement by Unity in ages… .its all reliant on third party extensions… which for the Hierachy always seem to get sluggish

Anyway I tried godot recently… and I think we can all appreciate Unity not being that bad … they still trying to make editor menus show up without taking over a 1 second to draw.

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To be honest, I couldn’t care less how it looks. Although it looks pretty decent now too.

What I care for, is that the information design is cluttered, convoluted and confusing.

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We are just looking at preview. I do hope the final Unity 6 brings some breaking changes. It doesn’t just have to be a name, but a death and a rebirth. How long has it been Unity 5 now? So far I observe it has more integration towards DOTS which is good. Hopefully it won’t only be, but will definitely include a massive tidy up of all menu’s and options.

Tell you what always confused me, Preferences and Project Settings. I don’t know why, just tend to wonder which one X option is in, and then which section, every time. Maybe Global Settings and Project Settings might be more logical together with a tidy up of options. And also making sure the less logical options either 1) always have helpful Tooltips rather than like C# without Intellisense, or 2) maybe a ? in each tab that is a hyperlink to a full explanation of all the options. While we can obviously google these things, it would be nice if everything was just there. A ? might save clogging up the editor, or editor programming. A lot of this effort has gone into the Package manager which is nice, although not sure if that is exclusive to U6.

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“We are just looking at preview. I do hope the final Unity 6 brings some breaking changes” … yeah lol… I’d be happy if it were everything that could be in Unity7 brought forward by like 5 years.

And if the setting isn’t Project Settings or Preferences… Anything to do with graphics you can go find things all over the place. like various Default Renderpipeline settings to go through in the inspector, Lighting has its own window it’s that special… I now remember where Project Settings> Editor > Enter Playmode settings are…though that has had a layout change and I still get confused as to which setting is best to use… though memory mapped as its the one project setting that saves half your life waiting for sstuff to actually work.

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There are entirely too many people getting confused by the term “preview”. We’re looking at a TECH release. It’s only a “preview” in the same sense that Unity 2021.1 and 2021.2 were “previews” of their LTS Unity 2021.3.

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I know, well everything has to have it’s hype/hope. Living up to it is another things :slight_smile: