Today, we want to highlight a feature introduced in Unity 6 Preview: the Piercing Selection Menu.
Selecting objects in a visually noisy Scene View can be challenging. Selection cycling alleviates this somewhat, but in complex or deep hierarchies this is still very painful. In Unity 6, we introduce a piercing selection menu that lists all objects underneath the cursor (activated through ctrl + right click on Windows and cmd + right click on MacOS).
I might suggest sorting the list by parentage, since you currently might select a child object when you wanted to choose “the whole thing”.
This is fantastic! Very great addition.
Awesome! I’d suggest highlighting the hovered object to further improve this feature:
Kinda a shame the nicer context menu’s got cut, though is a good feature if somewhat long overdue.
I actually implemented the highlighting idea when the new context menus (that spiney199 mentions) were still a thing. This isn’t possible with the system context menus because it’s much more difficult to know when a context menu item becomes hovered or not, and things get hairier across different platforms like mac and linux. We may potentially revisit the idea in the future.
I’m actually unaware of the new/nicer non-system context menu. May I ask when/where it shows up?
It existed between versions 2023.2.0a15 and 2023.3.0b1
Why not make it a UI toolkit popup window? Unity - Manual: Create a pop-up window
I’m entirely of the opinion that if highlighting on mousehover works on a OS platform it should be added and if it doesn’t work on the OS platform then just a note to say for that platform it doesn’t, people should nag the OS developers to sort there stuff out so it can be supported.
And I really want the highlighting, it removes guess work… which is the entire of point good workflow in reducing wasted steps and UX.
Good UX shouldn’t be held back rubbish operating systems lowering the bar whichever ones they maybe.
Glorious!
May I suggest also a radius of click that can be twiddled up and down via the mousewheel?
So I ctrl-right-click and get this list, but while it is up I can roll my wheel and increase the size of my “poke” in very fine increments, ideally one screen pixel, whatever that works out to be in camera space, and see the popup list change dynamically as I widen, narrow it.
EDIT: although, come to think of it that probably would trigger the accessibility focus rolling up and down on the picklist. Hm…
I was reading Unity 6 release notes and noticed the following sentence:
The piercing menu provides a UI that lists all GameObjects under the pointer. GameObjects in the menu can be highlighted and selected.
Unless it’s a leftover from old release notes, that’s great news!
What I’d need is a selection of connected objects. Like eg if you have a tower with multiple segments I’d like to click on the roof of it and it should downwards select all the segments as well. Potentially ivy vertices that touch it as well.