I actualy never thought about using Search API for it honestly. I have used it before, but might have to look into that. Main reason for using the ListView currently though was a wip drag and drop feature from the list of items to a graph minimap to quickly set spawn points for certain characters, enemies, and a few more interactions, but I can see about the Search API for somethings.
Might be a skill issue on my part, but zooming in and out of the view in the UI builder doesn’t work the same way as idlt does in the normal scene view on my MacBook. I don’t know if it’s some setting I need to check but I can’t drag around the view with 2 fingers on touchpad. That would be a feature if it’s not considered a bug currently
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First off, I wanted to say that UI Toolkit is in a really great spot, and the upcoming features through 6.7 are exactly what it needs (animation support, more native-feeling editor integration, etc). Really appreciate that you guys are taking the time to do UI right rather than slapping something together.
UI Toolkit is now a good UI rendering and layout engine for static UI. It’s about as effective as the web, or even a little better, which is fantastic for anything that feels like a webpage. That’s great!
Looking into the future, what would really take UI Toolkit to a new level is better tooling for creating interactive animation.
A great example of this workflow is Rive. It goes beyond keyframe-style animation to add constraints that let you drive certain attributes based on others, or by input values from the data bindings.
It starts to think of UI animation not like playing static timelines, but as a more physical and interactive system. You can see this also in SwiftUI, which is why Apple UI feels so much richer than Android. It responds in an analog way, based on your input, not just by firing a single animation.
Overall, I’d love to be able to produce the kinds of stuff that Rive can make with Unity UI natively. 
More examples, which would currently be quite hard to create:
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First of all, thank you for the introduction! The UI Toolkit team is probably the best of all right now, both in terms of the stability of new features, API quality improvements, and, last but not least, the feedback we receive here on the forum.
Secondly, the question that I haven’t seen here yet, but which interests me more than anyone else: how will the UI Toolkit animation system work? Will it work using the old animation system, is it being developed immediately for a new animation system, and will it support both, or will it be its own internal system, independent of what we have now?
This question is especially interesting, because let’s be honest, the old animation system is very bad for UI animation, and I would like to believe that we will get something better.
As for the most anticipated features, these are definitely animations. As already mentioned, the UI Toolkit is now great for creating static interfaces, but everything about dynamics is very difficult to implement - even the seemingly looped animation of “ripple” requires complex manipulations.
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Sorry for the off topic, I just want to share what I was able to achieve with the UI Toolkit’s Vector API.
Yolo (object recongnition) effect based on mesh bounds. Thank you UI Toolkit team and keep on with the amazing job you are doing.
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I want to add another point for better navigation controls, like in classic UGUI. I really really want to use UI Toolkit, but the lack of explicit navigation is a complete blocker. I don’t want the focus to whiz off to some UI off-screen or to a button that’s in the background. I want to control where every button goes. I don’t trust the current focus system to actually do what I want.
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Thanks for the post, can’t wait for 6.7 to play with all the new things. Here a list of things that you could consider for future versions:
- Add support for
calc()in USS - Set Picking Mode from USS
- Change the value of USS variables from C#
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Will this also include Timeline support for UI Animations?
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My next big thing is adding sound effects to the UI via USS. I am disappointed that I don’t see that in the roadmap.
For example, I want all my buttons to make a “click” sound when clicked. An audio clip when an error happens, a bubble sound when changing focus on the menu, etc.
As an alternative, I would like transition events to work with custom uss properties. I could use that to implement audio and haptic feedback via uss. Maybe the new animation system would allow me to tap into those events?
3d objects in the UI is super exciting. Today I am rendering them to a rendertexture and then using that in an image, it works, but it is tricky and I would love to delete all that code.
Event binding would also be very cool.
Thanks for all the work done in UI Toolkit in 6.x, it is becomming a real pleasure to use.
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Soft masking + Inverted mask for Label/Painter2D
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Why not make a custom component for that tho? Just inherit from Button and add the property for the sound clip and suscribe to its own .clicked to trigger the sound.
That would be UXML tho, not USS. If you really mean USS, I don’t think that should be done at all, CSS is only about layout and visuals, not reactions or triggers. UXML is the one that should have events and such, and can be extended fairly easy if needed.
Same for 3D objects, a render texture does the job if needed, I personally would keep UITK strictly 2D, each thing for its own use. But that is just my opinion, ofc.
Because then I have to use my special button, menu, drop-down, etc everywhere in the interface.
I do mean USS, as in styling. Something along the lines of:
.button:hover {
audio: URL("bubble.wav")
}
That I can put in my theme and add consistent sfx to all my ui.
I can do this functionality myself easily if transition events worked with custom USS properties
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I think sounds in uss is not a bad idea. When we get keyframes in uss we could then specify different sounds for keys in animation.
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Wow I’m genuinely looking forward to everything listed in active development. Not enough people have been asking for a better animation workflow because that will certainly change our lives forever.
The last thing I’m waiting for that’s not in the lists is better gamepad/focus navigation workflows. What UIToolkit currently has is very rudimentary and not flexible at all. The moment you want behavior that’s not what the focus ring wants to do, you gotta manually code focus behavior for every direction from every UI element. This scales terribly, especially when the UI element is supposed to be generic and reusable . At the very least expose the directional navigation targets in the UIBuilder. UE5’s widget NavigationRules does this fantastically. I also ask that the Focus Ring be overridable so we can take full control of the behavior. And lastly, visualization of the navigation paths like UGUI would be huge.
In general I’m super excited about the direction we’re going!
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I have implemented this with a source generator. It parses the uxml document file and generates a Document+View class where every named visualelement is automatically registered. It is really a game changer as you avoid a lot of error in Q calls.
What would help my workflow would be the ability of setting data-xxx custom attributes like in real html. Is there any plan for that?
That’s what I ended up doing: I have my own version of almost every component. It felt the only way to be “free” of .unity-xxx classes being automatically added. Wish there was a “headless” version of the components.
In a sense, that’s also what web component libraries do, no? You use their special components everywhere in your (web)app.
Sounds interesting. Id be interested to see what the generated code looks like.
Are you referencing your elements by name?
From what you should prioritize next
- Addressable Asset Bundles support
Does this mean the current UItoolkit can not be Addressable asset? Disallowing remote bundle workflow?
If I have a need to update some UI layout and its image, do I need to rebuild the game from scratch and send app for review?
For us the top priorities on your list from most to least important would be:
- Particles in UI
- Grid layout aligned with CSS Grid
- Z-index, gap
- Soft masking
Because these are things you can’t really work around at all as long as they’re missing.
Stuff like 3D objects in UI or first-child etc are extremely useful to have but more of a quality of life thing since you can at least work around not having them.
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