Scene Tooling 2021 Preview - Extended Overlays

Unity Engine
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Hello! Welcome to a preview of our new Extended Overlays solution! As a reminder, this is only in planning, we can’t guarantee anything, but we really do want your feedback and thoughts, early in the process, so thanks for watching!

As we all know - Unity has lots of overlays, and many of these have problems. Sometimes they overlap, or conflict, many of them look and function differently, and all are difficult to customize.

This isn’t just a feature issue - at a foundational level, we simply can’t have good, consistent tools and info without a modern, customizable, overlay system. So - we’re fixing that!

Additional note - the keyword here is consistency, so this new overlay system is being built as a generic system, applicable to all (reasonable) areas of Unity. As such, we’ve made a “generic” video, and if you have a hankering for a real-world example … check out the Scene Tooling Ecosystem post!

Thanks for viewing, excited to discuss and build this up with everyone’s help!

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Any update on the availability of the preview build?

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Nothing yet, it’s a long process merging into trunk :smile: Maybe a week or two!

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This looks very promising! Do we create custom overlays using UI Toolkit or IMGUI? Or can we use both, like an Editor Window? I’m super excited to try this out!

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Hi @Catsoft-Works ! UI Toolkit is the preferred way, though an overlay display IMGUI if necessary :slight_smile: Glad you dig it!

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Looking forward to testing. Really very useful and interesting.:smile:

do asset grids support that too? because currently the embedded version is not so practical.

However, if you plan to incorporate the integrated snap to work on the overlay, that would be awesome.:stuck_out_tongue:

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Hi! The built-in Grids system will be an overlay, yes! :slight_smile:

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Any news on that?

it would be great to see that in the next 2021.1 beta :smile:

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2021.2 is the current plan :slight_smile:
You can try it out right now though!

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Will this still be for 2021.2? We’re currently at Alpha 16 publicly released so I’m just wondering if it’s going to be in a later 2021.2 alpha release, beta, or pushed to 2022.1?

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Hey! There have been some bumps in the road, keep an eye out for Alpha 17 :slight_smile:

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Hi!
I got frozen in my enthusiasm by some usual issues.

I wanted to create my visual element and when I imported UI Toolkit, it appears it uses classes (MeshInfo, TextInfo, FontAsset …) that have changed namespace (from Textcore to TextCore.Text).
Any chance you know who to ping to settle this? I am on a quick experimentation flow for this and don’t want to (and shouldn’t) patch this nor maintain myself.
Cheers!

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@gabrielw_unity are there plans on having context sensitive shortcuts? Currently e. g. the sceneview must have the focus in order for keyboard shortcuts to be registered (unless they are modifier shortcuts). It seems that you guys use ClutchSortCutAttribute, but that requires a context which must implement the IShortcutToolContext interface which isn’t accessible for us.

I created the post of my problem here .

I thought this might fit into the new tooling system, so hence the post here :slight_smile:

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