How many procedural UI assets do we need?!

I am not sure the asset store will ever improve in terms of finding the right asset. Right now we have so many variations of the (original?) Procedural UI Image asset, it would be impossible to know which to get.

  • Procedural UI Image
  • Procedural UI
  • Model Procedural UI Kit
  • Procedural UI Pack
  • Procedural UI Elements - Shaders
  • Procedural Mesh UI

Not only do these assets all share the same key name parts “Procedural UI”, but many look much the same in terms of functionality.
So could Unity 1. Improve name separation 2. Only allow so many versions of the exact same thing?

Hi @andyz, the Asset Store is an open store, and as long as people aren’t stealing code, for example, or violating other rules, there are no restrictions on how many similar ideas can be published here.

Yes but I think that is the issue - should it be open to anything being sold there? It becomes hard to “separate the wheat from the chaff”!
Unity should do more to at least push the best to the top if they want to keep it so open.

I agree that it’s not great to have 4-5 Assets that are named almost identically except for one word at the beginning and/or end. It’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for publishers who are trying to build a brand.

But I understand why it’s the case.

This thread hits me, having just released my own Procedural UI asset that is not named “something Procedural UI something,” but instead “Flexible Image”

And yes, there are a lot of similar assets. But I believe mine goes further than the rest. Specifically, you can have multiple quads per Image (aiding composition, layout, and cleaning up the hierarchy), and everything uses single shared material (and therefore batches) despite having at least as many parameters as contemporaries.

The issue is that when people want a Procedural UI solution, they search “procedural UI”, and despite my asset having this as a tag (as well as “procedural” and “procedural image”), and mentioned multiple times in the description, and receiving a “new asset boost”, the search order is:

-All those assets you mentioned
-A number of unrelated assets
-Finally, my asset

So the search algorithm seems to be encouraging very similar naming. If you follow the same pattern, you get punished.

I’m updating my asset to have a subtitle that includes “Procedural UI” in it. I expect that will help, and is probably just necessary.

I’m not sure how Unity would fix this on their end, assuming they agree there’s something to fix. Maybe a short description of what the asset does, that is only used for search, which is weighted higher than the name itself? Or maybe weighing the name lower when there are many assets with similar a name, pointing to that term being more of a “category” than a “brand”?