I guess the whole problem, that UI Toolkit doesn’t allow you to create alike site constructors/UGUI.
It is still just faster to use UGUI. Though, I mention again, I like how good looking you can make UI Toolkit interface with default tools.
Imagine for a moment Unreal to recreate Fortnite UI’s using UI TK 
Like bring a game directly to web engine
What do you even mean by site constructor?
I hope that one day we will see at least one game that using UI TK I’m really curious to see it.
Well at least by just clicking on it you can do better things that the actual UI TK in a few seconds.
Let me guess… No. Since it’s completely hidden and confusing it’s extremly hard to do one thing right. If the point of Unity was creating the most complex UI system like that they should add more than 1000+ pages if not more to cover at least it’s functions. Why creating such complicated things and reinvent the same wheel that already exists without even a documentation. Because for me the current documentation is just for basic usage and it still was made for Unity Editor usage case.
No everyone is welcome. I love to hear opinions but what happens here is not opinions anymore. Merry Christmas.
Or it has more features that need to be covered.
The basics are still basic and be picked up in a day. It definitely didn’t take me more than an afternoon to get started with UI Toolkit, about the same time as UGUI really.
Very little of UI Toolkit is editor specific. Basically the only thing that is editor only is, by no surprise… The editor serialised property binding system, alongside a very, very small number of controls.
Otherwise pretty much everything else works the same for editor or runtime UI, save the runtime specific systems such as runtime bindings.
You know, things like Wix, maybe even Wordpress goes under this.
Where anyone can go and create their free website if using ad link like “Wix.yoursite.com”.
Basically they are doing the CSS of UI Toolkit, but you can put functionality to buttons you make like in Unity UGUI, becase in a REAL web-design stuff you also have Javascript.
To answer the original question, it is a direct replacement of the IMGUI editor UI system. It exists as the old immediate mode (IMGUI) system was grinding the editor to a standstill.
Runtime features have been added after the fact and are best suited to app/web developers familiar with modern UI frameworks joining the Unity ecosystem or teams which require a workflow that separates the look and feel from the logic underneath.
Strategically I think it’s a great move for Unity as an App platform as it heads towards full .Net compatibility.
You guys sound like amazing coders so I assume you don’t do much editor customisation, sadly I don’t think this helps you with your mobile game project today.
And this is already everyone’s know from the beggining of this thread. “Good morning Sir”. Instead of specifying your delusional thoughts about this OP you should at least read it.
So now, tell me, what is Unity about? What is it specifically used for? Is it a web engine now, called Unity Web Engine? Or is it still Unity Game Engine? I’m starting to lose focus on it.
If Unity is now a web engine, why not just use WordPress then? At least it has all the necessary functionality that Unity forgot to copy and paste while recreating the same wheel of already existing features.
Again, ‘Good morning, Sir.’ UI Toolkit is great for editing or customizing things in the editor, and no one disagrees with that. I’ve always said differently on that point, but UI Toolkit should stay that way. The runtime is pure garbage, with a lot of missing functions that are incredibly useful in game development. It’s mostly documented for editor-related stuff, which doesn’t even rely on runtime usage at all. It’s really hard for beginners to learn, as most of the documentation focuses only on the editor part. Many users end up learning from forums instead of relying on the documentation, or they directly ask developers, and developers agree there’s nothing properly documented.
Again, UI Toolkit is great only for the Unity Editor, and it should stay that way!
That depends on which project you’re working on. If everyone starts to recreate a ‘Genshin Impact,’ then it’s probably useful.
I have various different projects, including games and tools, and I have a lot of customization. But for basic projects or simple games, it’s not even necessary, especially when it comes to mobile platforms. But an amazing dev like you should know that already.
Timberborn uses it.
Yeah the only one game ever exists for now that using UI Toolkit. Interesting!
I don’t really see anything complex in terms of UI. It looks static and very basic just showing some stats nothing more complicated than this.
It’s static because the UI itself has no effects at all but that’s explainable because of UI Toolkit limitation and I don’t blame the devs of this game because the game itself is amazing but UI is very ugly in this game.
I’m still waiting till today to see more games with different genres at least 2 other games that using a crap UI Toolkit not asking for hundreds of games of course because it’s not possible to see that in the near future.
I use both in my game.
Specifically, I use UIToolkit for emulating something that looks like an application running under a PC operating system using ASCII graphics.
I also use it for things like various options screens and inventory management screens.
But for elements such as HUD targeting displays, crosshairs and reticle boxes, the navigational compass, warning indicators, etc. I use uGUI because it’s much more freeform for non-textual elements and I get tangible objects that I can edit in-situ within the game world, which is so much easier to work with.
UIToolkit is a lot harder to get into in terms of its onboarding process. You need a lot more boilerplate to link up dynamic elements to scripts and the like. Honestly, I’m glad UIToolkit exists because I can use it to do SOME things I would much rather not use uGUI for, but I hope they never do away with uGUI because it’s also very useful in other ways.
PS: I’ve had better luck with Phind than ChatGPT when it comes to making UIs under UIToolkit, just make sure you include the word “UIToolkit” in your queries. I would ask it things like:
Unity, UIToolkit, how do I arbitrarily move a visualelement around without disrupting the rest of the layout
It sure beats having to sift through the hundreds of pages of documentation and it’s saved me a lot of sanity.
Why is this even a thing? Old-timer Unity staff Aras wondered that too: https://aras-p.info/blog/2024/08/11/Random-thoughts-about-Unity/
To this day I frankly don’t understand why Unity made UIToolkit
I believe he answered it in the same blog post:
There was a large faction coming from the web development world, and they wanted to put a ton of “web-like” technologies into the engine. Maybe make various tools work in the browser as well. Someone was suggesting rewriting everything in JavaScript, as a way to fix development velocity, and my fear is that they were not joking.
My $0.02 as an active web developer for over two decades, a Unity freelancer since v3.5, and UITK user since it’s release…
UI Toolkit’s added capabilities is offset by the friction it brings from forcing it’s web-based square peg into the round holes of many games. The paradigm is fine for the web ecosystem since it evolved around it, but it’s not the ideal architecture for games. If you paint within UITK’s lines, it’s workable. But compared to uGUI’s flexibility, it’s not intuitive to implement novel creative edge cases that games naturally often require. It don’t see that can be fully addressed since synergy with the rest of Unity’s tool was powerful flexibility lost in UITK’s isolation and will always feel wanting to me.
I kind of like the direction that UIToolkit is going. I’ve tried it a few times but I’ve always gone back to UGUI. I think it would have to reach a level similar to Noesis GUI which Baldur’s Gate 3 uses before I’d really look at using it in a project.
I noticed this terrifying comment from one of the Unity staff awhile ago. I can’t really see users letting UGUI be replaced with UIToolkit though.
While I definitely champion UI Toolkit it is still missing crucial features, so I also would only be comfortable with uGUI being dropped until UI Toolkit can do 100% of what uGUI could do.
Though I’ll be happy the day IMGUI dies.
Per project pricing? You have to buy it for each project?
And you have to pay per platform on top of that. I don’t think I’d ever use it but it does look cool.
What I still don’t understand is why Unity pushed something incomplete and presented it as a recommended UI solution. It’s well known that UI Toolkit is extremely limited — it’s essentially just static UI, even worse than basic web UI. So why did they release UI Toolkit as a non-experimental package?
@uDamian himself stated in the official UI Toolkit development post that it would take them over 9 years to implement some crucial features. So my question is: why is it even available for runtime use now?
Years ago, Unity promised that most critical features would be ready by around 2023, but that turned out to be a major lie and a huge disappointment.
Honestly, Unity still doesn’t have a good UI system — both options are garbage and lack essential features that, after more than a decade, are still missing.
Is it time for the community to start building their own UI system from scratch? Is that what Unity actually expects from us?
If they can’t complete or properly extend UI Toolkit, why not open-source it and let the community help?
I’m willing to contribute and implement missing features myself for the benefit of the community, but without access to the source, there’s not much I can do.
Personally, I don’t trust anything that this person says anymore. In the past, he promised a lot of things that were never delivered and still aren’t, so I’m not really concerned about it.
This is why I say it should have remained an experimental package. They could have clearly labeled it as such and shipped many features, even if broken, buggy, or unusable — at least we could have tested them. Instead, they presented it as a recommended package, creating false expectations of it being complete.
I know it technically shows as not recommended, but in many posts they claimed UI Toolkit is actually recommended. As a result, many newcomers tried to adopt it without any real success.
UI Toolkit can’t be a package as too many other packages would be using it as a dependency, among other reasons. It has good reason to be a core feature of the engine.
And new features are in the alpha/beta versions of Unity. Such as World Space UI being in preview in Unity 6.2, despite your nay-saying. So yes, new features are being tested.