I ran out of characters for the subject…
So I’ve been working hard on an extension that I would love to release in the Asset Store. It started off with me making a simple tool and now I’ve gone further with it!
Here it is, in all its 1 tool glory (an isolate tool)! Seems pretty basic on the outside (what a toolbar should be) but its internal workings are definitely growing more complex. I’ve taken inspiration from Maya with the drop down menu as your current “toolbox”. So depending on what toolbox you select, a set of tools will be shown. Simple!
Here’s the isolate tool in action (just because):
Select object
Click isolate button.
Anyway, back to the toolbar. So I want the whole thing to be really customisable. And also fit into Unity’s current scripting workflow. So, following Unity’s footsteps. To make a tool you simply: Make a c# script, make it inherit from my own monobehaviour/Editor-like class called ATool. Then just like normal, you get callbacks such as “OnToolbarGUI ()”, “OnEnable ()”, “ToolUpdate ()” ect ect. I will also have an API with some helper functions/variables etc for use within tools. One particular API are special GUI buttons depending on your type of tool. So for a tool like the isolate tool, you’ll use a special “toggle tool” button. For something like a measurement tool, a “interactive scene tool” lets say, you only want that tool active, you’d want all other tools to be deactivated, like how rotate, scale etc work.
Customisation:
So I said I want the toolbar to be customisable. So the main one is the ability to hook your own tools into it, like I mentioned. You make your tool inherit from ATool, make sure it’s in the “tools” folder, then start scripting away. My code will check for any scripts that inherit from ATool, perform some other checks then once it’s all good it will be available. This leads onto my next feature: custom toolboxes.
This is the settings window so far. (pretty bare I know). So eventually (right after I publish this post I’m starting on it) ill have two boxes below what I have so far. One will be “Tools in toolbox”, the other will be “Tools available”. You drag whatever tools you want from one box to the other.
Each tool will have “Global” and “Scene based” settings. So any tool that operates on specific objects and needs to store this information, will be able to do so and not cause any problems.
Other little things:
You don’t need to attach anything to any game objects to make the toolbar work. There’s a menu, with Enable, Disable and Settings sub menus. I think this is pretty cool as I’ve noticed there’s quite a few assets that require you to attach scripts to gameobjects to work.
The name (maybe temp, maybe not, who knows?) is The Shed. I’m on the fence about the name, but its sticking for now!
Some of my intended tools include: measurement, aligning/snapping (to vertex, grid etc), some shortcuts, custom 2D grid with added tile painter tools (I actually started this a while back, I’ll need to make it work with my toolbar then finish it) and some other tools that I stupidly wrote on a receipt so it’s probably in the bin, maybe.
I’m going to be packing a few things that aren’t part of the toolbar. An example I have at the moment is an updated transform inspector (which I modestly named “Better Transform”) which shows you the local and global positions / rotation of an object. The way it determines what to show is based on what the “Global/Local” button in the top left of unity is set to. I also have a multiple tags system, which I’ve called “All The Tags”.
So, first up I guess is, is anyone actually interested? It’s all well me planning all this stuff and putting time into it, but I need to know if there’s any form of interest? I felt like I needed to get to a stage where the core works before I did this post, I feel like I’m there now and if people are interested then this should be enough.
So anyone interested, what feedback do you have? Good? Bad? I don’t mind, throw it all at me! As long as it’s constructive, then I’ll listen!
And then really pushing the boat out there, if you’ve made it this far… Pricing. I’m stuck on this one. I can’t make my mind up and because I’m from sunny england, I have to take currency into consideration. So, if you have made it this far, you’re interested? You’re maybe even possibly a little bit like “Yeah I might buy this, maybe possibly”. How much would you realistically pay for this? Let’s say it comes with 20 in built tools?
I appreciate anyone that even reads this, and even more to anyone that replies! Cheers xox
