From beta 3 changelog: Unity 2023.3.0b3
I’ve enabled pre-release packages in Project Settings but I still can’t find the com.unity.graphtoolsauthoringframework package. How do we add this to a project?
I’ve tried adding the package by name, which says that no package was found by that name. I’ve tried looking in Unity package registry, it’s not there either. I’ve tried manually adding it to manifest.json but since no version has been specified, that failed as well.
+1! 
I do not recommend you use this for obvious reasons
However for anyone interested, I compiled the version in 2023.3.0b2 as a standalone dll
(they’re managed so you should be able to decompile and read it for security if you wish)
I did this purely for education reasons as I was curious if it was even possible get this to work considering the heavy reliance on internal unityengine and unityeditor calls (and turns out I can). Great learning experience.
Thank you for this. Was planning on doing it this week myself, but glad to see community members coming together to do this.
Will have to look through this and see what all has changed recently.
Still unable to find Graph Tools Authoring Framework package in beta 4.
I’ve been wondering the same thing. Saw this on patch notes yet cannot find the package.
+1
And with runtime support +!
If I have to guess, it’s the Muse Behaviour graph tool thingy.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.muse.behavior@0.5/manual/index.html
and using this weird package:
https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.dt.app-ui@1.0/manual/index.html
Sample project:
Youtube introduction:
Ive stumbled onto a maintained third party open source Unity graphing tool, gave it a spin and its pretty fine and does not depend on any Unity unity graph code. So if you cant wait and want to give something a spin, take a look at GitHub - Gentlymad-Studios/NewGraph: A general node graph solution centered on data management. This is based on the idea to visualize complex data structures as graph networks without having to modify already established data classes.
All of that is very specific. Graph Tools Foundation was supposed to power all Unity’s graph based tools with the same backend. And changelog mentions a new package by its name, which is none of these.
Is it maintained? Last release was a year ago. Any significant development seems to have stopped some 10 months ago.
It depends on what you mean by maintained. The last bugfixes are 3 months old.The team behind it uses it interally extensively for their releases, so they add new functions seasonally and only if it suits their games I guess.
I didnt have yet the opportunity to put the package through its paces properly but thus far it seems like a fine replacement for the NodeGraphProcessor alternative
I am using it to create a branching dialogue/cutscene systems (akin to those used by Telltale tool).
I may consider switching to Graph Foundation (if it ever comes out) but only if it proves to be a stable and reliant piece of tech. Too often I spent so long debugging ‘Production Ready’ Unity code, which which is unstable and missing basic features even like 7 years after release (Even Timeline is suffering from this. Where’s the OnComplete event? Why are the states so unreliable?).
Gotcha. The premise is intriguing with the attribute approach, I’ll give this a go. Too bad it’s not working with enter play mode settings, but I can probably live with it. Waiting on Unity is indeed pointless, especially now that morale is at an all time low and all departments are hit by layoffs. Everything is delayed or cancelled.
Whats not working with the Play Mode Settings? Did u test this or did you read it off from somewhere on the repo? I always change the settings for faster iteration speed but forgot to do it this time and was planning to do it later.
This open issue: https://github.com/Gentlymad-Studios/NewGraph/issues/29 Haven’t tried myself yet. (Looks like it’s only for MonoGraphModel)
Still unable to find com.unity.graphtoolsauthoringframework package in beta 6.
Still cannot find com.unity.graphtoolsauthoringframework package in beta 8.
Please take what I say next with a grain of salt until an official announcement comes out or a dev mentions it.
For those wondering about this. This change removed the Graph Foundation that was originally part of the core editor into it’s own package for the devs making it.
Graph Foundation by the looks of it was being developed as apart of the core editor, but they split it off as a seperate package to make development easier, faster, better to maintain for updates/bug fixes when released, and to be able to improve project times using assemblies.
This change makes it if someone is not using the Graph Foundation system or any Unity package that relies on it, will not get extra bloat code in their project. This change will improve the default editor load times by not having it bundled in the core editor. So huge win for us that might not need it. I have seen stuff for async loading of packages if I am seeing the code correctly, but not sure if it is a test idea or not from Unity. So imagine packages loading as needed or after the editor first initially loads up. That part not to sure about.
The biggest change that came from this also means Graph Foundation will no longer have to rely on the Unity Version.
This means Graph Foundation could be back ported to older versions of Unity where possible.
My best educated guess is Unity 2023.2 will be the minimum version though for backporting depending on how much more they have of it to finish for the following reasons.
Unity 2023.2 introduced a lot of improvements to the UI Systems via UGUI 2 release that has Text Core and also the major remake of the entire UI Toolkit Systems.
UI Toolkit in 2023.2 had a complete remake almost that no joke halves the amount of code needed to create custom editors, inspectors, or property drawers. It introduced the following.
Binding System - To whatever dev created this you are a god send thank you so much. This made things so much better for UI stuff. As far as I can tell this is built on the Properties package which is an amazing dev tool for anyone who hasn’t used it. Imagine two way binding to any variable you want built in, not just for UI without needing to do a lot of object references in code. By object references I mean C# objects not just Gameobjects. This was done by a type of visitor/observer pattern combo design.
Updated UI Toolkit UXML system. This fixed a lot of pains about writing UXML do to the better assembly reading systems in UXML and the Binding/Property systems is built into UXML to make it way faster for development.
Created UXML attributes you put over your variables and classes. This replaced the old ugly factory system you had to set up in each new custom Visual Element Control. This no joke removed 20% of the code needed to do any custom control and in my project removed 37% of code because I had more complex custom controls.
Because the previous mentioned changes I am assuming the earliest they would be willing to backport it to would be 2023.2. This would honestly be okay for anyone not wanting to upgrade to Unity 6 when it comes out.
Hope this info helps people and brings some good news.
For what I am about to say if Unity is not ready for this to be talked about openly with the community or public yet, feel free forum moderators to delete this post and message me saying hey it ain’t ready to talk about it yet.
Tried to find any posts about it on the forums or mentioned anywhere and I couldn’t after a bit unless I somehow over looked it, so not sure if this is ready to be talked about or if it was already announced somewhere I missed.
To the actual post with an image showing why I am talking about this in the graph foundation forum.
I also am wondering if the timeline for the new Graph Authoring Framework is to line up with the other major UI feature coming out. I saw that package version 1 was release near Valentine’s day. Had some fun times playing with the Story Book and Redux examples. Took me a bit to get it working for the weird custom case I was wondering if I could pull off, but managed to use it to make UI components that can be converted to Vue, Angular, Blazor app, and React components with a click in editor.
Basically there is a new UI feature built on top of UI Toolkit and the binding system that hit version one a couple weeks ago. This is not a new UI framework, but a new set of components features to make building UI in Unity a lot faster. Like it adds a bunch of new built in features to the UI Toolkit. It adds new systems to easily create UI Toolkit components for Android, iOS, Windows, MacOS, websites, and applications.
Super nice theme system for creating color themes real easy, premade library of icons, textures, font styles to easily create a custom UI style, action bar love the action bar component, and an example navigation graph for UI navigation as shown above.
Edited below:
Hope this gives some motivation on those waiting for Unity to share the new Graph Authoring Framework that is taking the place of Graph Foundation going forward. Let them take their time finishing it. It is going to be super nice.
They just announced that it is removed from Unity and we will supposed to use another package? Have you seen the OP of this thread?
