Hey all,
Does anyone use UI Toolkit instead of UGUI for their games?
I remember it being in preview for quite some time, but I haven’t been in Unity space in almost 3 years. Has that changed?
Thanks!
My work project had been integrating it for the past few months and a few days ago we made the decision to rip it out completely and go back to UGUI. It’s setting us back a couple of months but it was basically unusable from our standpoint. Our biggest gripes were performance (we have complex UIs) and a lack of shaders.
On a more personal level I couldn’t tolerate the overall lack of features and no source code access. UITK has to improve by leaps and bounds before I’ll even remotely consider it going forward. UGUI simply destroys it in too many ways including the vast community resources available on the store and github.
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Its usefulness will depend on the type of game and the UI it requires.
For my project its perfect and it’s making UI work that much faster and enjoyable, when I usually despise UI work. The UI is primarily some kind of information overlay with only one group of elements to navigate through (makes gamepad navigation work out of the box).
I think most important to note is that it is not uGUI and you can’t treat it like is. Trying to do so will make your experience worse. That was my initial experience and it almost made me go back to uGUI. Though when I got my head around how the layouting works and style selectors (no web background), and to embrace a kind of model-view approach with my UI and game data, and in particular: find a workflow that I’m most comfortable with… I don’t want to go back to uGUI’s absolutely indecipherable layout system.
Namely I often generate my layout mostly through code; I have very few hand placed visual element. I use a large number of custom visual elements to encapsulate behaviour and sometimes style, and to keep my visual elements reusable. Though it’s mostly styled through USS style sheets.
Though no World Space UI support and shader support are definitely no big knocks against it. Definitely need to weigh up its pros and cons to see if would work for your next project.
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I heavily advise you NOT to use UI Toolkit for any real work, its FAR from ready for game development.
Its extremely bugged, we use it on newest 2023.2 version, and its constant errors in console, you cannot even trace it, their UI Builder UI sometimes bugs out completely.
I have reported numerous bugs and I’m tired of it already, but we have to use it as we need same code for both editor and runtime, so there is no other option for us.
You will see A LOTS of these, welcome to “internal bug” world:
EDIT: Just to add to a credibility of my statements, we are working on Darfall, and we are using it for some system that has to work both in runtime and editor.
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Not sure if I should rejoice (as an Asset Store publisher who has a UGUI-based plugin) or cry (as someone who loves UI Toolkit).
At least UI Toolkit is good for making editor extensions (I hope).
Well, we’re using (nearly every UI element) UI Toolkit in our live game (GOKA Street). We’re not even updated to 2022 LTS or 2023.x yet (but will do). I think the UI Toolkit’s state is “depends on the UI needs and the game” right now. I mean, if you need many UI elements, easy transitions, easy extendibility (well, it’s easier after Unity 2023.2) and reusability, then I think you can use UI Toolkit. For simple UI needs, it might be overshot at the moment; Unity UI is much simpler for these kind of tasks.
But, be aware that, you’ll need some initial time to construct your UI base (I mean, a UI foundation for your game). After that, downhill al the way (at least, that was our experience).
Yes, there are some problems (and some important missing stuff); but I think Unity is in the right road for the last one year and for Unity 6+
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Could you submit a bug report in Help>Report a bug?
I did a week ago and attached project and reproduction steps.
But the issue is, there are some many other issues, we cannot report each one, as its just taking so much time from our development or many times we dont know reproduction steps as it happens randomly.
Thanks, what is the case number?
72490
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I wish UI worked like Godot. I hate both Unity GUI and UIToolkit.
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Ain’t Godot’s UI practically UGUI? Same anchor/hierarchy approach, just more premade components. It only redraws updated parts of UI, unlike UGUI, which redraws the whole canvas, but the rest seems pretty similar.
It has better layout components like flows.