Can’t wait. Does the GUI need to be done entirely from the Editor, or can you still generate UI elements from scripts? I don’t know much about it, and I haven’t used NGUI.
Tim, it looks great!
Can’t wait to get rid of a lot of code 
Are there going to be more high level components? like dropdowns, list boxes, tabs, resizable and movable windows, tabular layouts?
it does not look complicated to do it ourselves, but it would be nice if we didn’t have to.
What about drag and drop support?
Are there any kind of layouting?
Like can I make multiple boxes within a canvas layout with each other; using flowlayout/boxlayout/floating?
Can i create inline elements (inline in text)?
Is there support for hyperlinks in text?
Are there any kind of stylesheet system, or simliar?
Is it possible to create custom controls that derive form the existing controls? (sorry if you mentioned this and I missed it)
Can I have multiple styles within one text block? For example mixing different size or fonts of text.
I’m having a hard time believing that the fancy new UI system is a pure “draw rects in unity”-based system with anchoring and event connections exposed in the inspector. I mean, 3D gui with perspective is nice I guess (not really though), but how many will actually use that? I want sometime that at least has a fraction of the UI design functionality of what was standard in browsers 20 years ago. And to me, web design is the defacto standard for UI design.
Scripting and Editor are both supported. We’ll go into the API and things more later.
A few questions:
Will the new UI system eventually be rolled into an update of the EditorGUI system?
It looks from the video that the UI uses sprites, but also allows for more advanced materials than the current sprites allow. Is this correct, could we use something like SpriteLamp with the new UI? If so, does that also follow through to the Sprite system as a whole?
There will be a component library developed using the same API that you have access to (i.e no magic internal unity stuff). We are not quite talking about what will be in there for the first release yet.
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The first version of the new UI system will ship with only a very limited set of built-in components (the components you see in the video plus a few extra elements). Then we will gradually expand from that. The system is fully extendable though, so people with a bit of programming skills can make new components that are just as integrated as the built-in ones.
Drag-and-drop is supported in the API we’ll have an example scene with it.
Tabs you can do without scripting. We are shipping with Toggle and ToggleGroup and you can then use a ToggleGroup with a Toggle for each tab.
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Looking very very useful Hope the free/ pro split does not ruins the tool
We’ll be talking more about the layout system over the coming weeks.
Currently the text rendering is the same Rich Text that core unity uses: http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StyledText.html
Not with style sheets no. We will allow things like asset swapping that you can use in the future.
Yes, more information will come later
We don’t feel that web UI design is really the defacto standard for UI design for games. That being said, when we talk about our low level components soon you will see that if you really want to do a ‘web like style sheet’ system you can develop your own on top of the new UI system.
That…looks…amazing.
Curious about how it handles different resolutions as this seems to be a constant thorn with the current gui systems requiring camera scripts, atlas swapping, etc.
Sounds interesting. Looking forward to it.
Thats too bad… Not useful at all for me. Anything in the roadmap here?
Ok great.
I dont get this. With a html/css based system you would have millions of experienced and talented unity gui scripters ready from day one. Also, the things you can do with html and css these days never stops surprising and amaze me.
But its good that it is extendible. I hope its rigid enough that someone will make a good markup/stylesheet based layer ontop of it soon. Our programmers usually prototype UI in html, and implement in Unity after. The amount of time it takes to create a similar Ui in unity compared to html is staggering. The days of scaling rects and dragging textboxes is passed imo. With the responsive html frameworks and compiled css starting to become the standard, the gap will widen even more.
Sorry for spelling, typing on phone.
I’m also very curious on how will this handle, if at all, multiple resolutions (@2x, @3x, etc).
For the next video, I would love to hear more about the performance and back-end technical implementation. I assume you’re using a stencil buffer to create those image masks? How are the draw calls counted and tallied.
Can the GUI camera render other meshes that are not RectTransform (such as 3D meshes and particle systems)? Can you achieve particle effects on top of/below UI elements easily with a Camera-ScreenSpace or do you have to resort to a camera world space in order to not mess with render order?
Feedback: I personally feel that the Transform → Render order is backwards. I think that the GameObjects that are at the top of the canvas children should render on TOP of the GameObjects that are under it.
Looking good!
And Web browsers have huge teams of people whose sole job it is to make these CSS things perform adequately in a browser. Not even well, just adequately (compared to the performance that Unity is capable of). It’s incredibly unreasonable to expect the same thing from a game engine AND expect it to perform well.
Besides that, the overlap between Web designers and game developers is not so large. These tools behave much more like animation tools, the kind you might see in Photoshop, After Effects, Apple Motion, anything like that. Unity isn’t getting the “army of web developers”, but it is getting the army of animators. And the number of people capable of doing really cool things with CSS animation is absolutely DWARFED by the number of people capable of doing similarly impressive things in After Effects. In addition, the learning curve is much lower.
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Where do your artists/UX designers come into the process?
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Looking really good, think ill put my GUI work on hold for a while (it is not essential at the moment anyways).
Thats why I think a good idea would be to implement webkit deeply witin the Unity engine. Its certainly technically possibly, dont know about possible licence issues.
I dont follow your after effects comment. There are certainly more web developers than there are experienced after effects users out there. Not only that, but I dont even see how this is relevant. Knowing after effects doesnt help you much in the new UI as it is, but being a web developer would certainly give a huge boost in a html based UI system.
That was my first thought as well, especially because very animation tool ever behaves that way. However, with the new BaseHierarchySort abilities of 4.6, it might be possible to implement a “reverse” hierarchy sort that behaves that way. Only question is I’m not sure if it will have drag-and-drop reordering.
Out UX/UI people have web experience. We hired them with that in mind ofc.
Our pure artist are of course extremely used with working with content usable on the web.