Honestly, having to open a menu and press Move up 5 times in an image effect stack to get it to the top is annoying and slowly stack up with many of the other quirks I have like how the terrain engine won’t get you a preview of textures and objects as you choose them as it normally happens when you change materials.
Then there’s things like how you cannot even mess with materials without being afraid they get saved with a different setting because any change is automatically saved rather than only when pressing ‘Save Scene’.
What’s so hard about implementing something akin to saving material profiles the same as how I can store presets in my Digital Audio Workstation presets? Or even the way that you can customize and store many Unity Editor UI layout profiles.
It is starting to look old and outdated. Not to mention ugly for MAC standards. You
Rather than dedicating efforts to changing the forum layout that’s perfect as it is, you should be focusing your efforts on how to make things more intuitive inside of the game engine.
tl;dr I don’t care that most of the updates from the last two years have been useless to me, but what the heck is going on with the UI. THE MAIN STRENGTH OF THE UNITY ENGINE IS SUPOSSED TO BE ITS INTUITIVE UI AND IT IS FALLING BEHIND. /CAPS
Well, I should have worded that better:
‘The main strength of the Unity engine is supposed to be its intuitiveness and the UI is falling behind!’
Because at the end of the day, all engines are extensible just not intuitive to extent unless you have eaten and are familiarized with a huge chunk of the codebase
I know the editor is customizable, but is it that extensible that it allows creating a button next to the component icon that works as Move Up and Move Down component, or even allow placement of menus like Project Settings as tabs?
I can’t see why not. The default Inspector views don’t do this, but people have written replacements for them, and if you do that you can put whatever buttons you want.
The catch is that you’re talking about intuitiveness, but then you want more stuff added. There’s a fine balance that’s needed, because the more buttons and things you expose via the UI the less intuitive things are going to get. I definitely understand and encourage people who want to modify the Editor to better suit their work flows. I also agree that Unity’s default interface isn’t perfect, but I don’t think it’s so bad as to be detrimental to the engine’s intuitiveness and if I were to pick things to change they probably wouldn’t be the same ones you’ve picked.
Hmm… I think you should be able to stick “move up/move down” into popup menu (speaking of which, isn’t it already there?), but for inserting buttons you’ll need to dig too far into undocumented area. Anything WITHIN component area can be replaced by whatever you want, and you can rewrite gui for every component, if you feel like it. Even Transform (why, just why can’t I see actual quaternion there?).
Aaand as angrypenguin said you should be able make your own window which you could probably stick into the project instead of inspector. You need a way to iterate through components, and a way to locate editor associated with it (I think it can be done through reflection)
So, it probably (as in “very likely” kind of “probably”) can be done, I just don’t see the point in investing so much time into this.
I just don’t really find having a lot of buttons, using drag and drops and things like that “intuitive”. I prefer when program does not have unnecessary visible UI controls and operates through hotkeys.
Oh, there’s at least two of them on the Asset Store already. I’ve also written a significant chunk of a what’s essentially a hierarchical Inspector of my own, which does much (maybe even all) of the reflection part already. It’s some pretty verbose code, but relatively straightforward if you understand reflection.
My main piece of advice if you’re writing editor extensions is that you can call call both EditorGUI.xyz() and GUI.xyz() methods from Editor classes. Long ago I initially didn’t realise that and spent ages wondering why we couldn’t just easily draw a button in our Editor GUI when, silly me, it was right there all along.
I suspect this wouldn’t allow me to animate quaternions instead of euler angles in animation window, though. Either way even if quaternion is overkill at least having alternative angle-axis representation instead of euler angles would be great. In non-debug view.
Interesting.
This gave me the idea to open an additional inspector tab, then open input settings, lock it and it worked: the first inspector tab is not locked while the second inspector tab has the Input menu locked. Problem is that there is no way to rename the tab, but it suits my current purposes.
Now how did you stack all of the different project settings in the same tab? Through an editor script?
That’s where I am coming from. I myself prefer only doing things through hotkeys too thanks to Blender.
Manually having to grab the transform gizmo is the reason I cannot use Maya. With Unity, I have to put up with it.
However, like you are saying, Unity can only be customized through editor scripts which might be perceived as a fruitless endeavor or a waste of time unless you are a bored mormon.
Hence it would be good for Unity to fix things from their end or provide a more visual/APIexposed shortcut solution rather than have us delve too deep into undocumented areas.
It reminds me of the Reaper contributor DAW Custom Menu that simplifies the UI. The problem is that it might hide new features in new releases hence I stopped using it.
Out of all my softwares, Unity, which is also the most important, and was once at the cutting edge of UI intuitiveness, is now the one slowing me down the most in my content authoring.
This is where I am coming from. Right clicking faders, knobs, buttons, menus and having a pop up that allows setting up shortcuts, tabs, etc.
Reaper is insane. I use all of the previous, but the Reaper UI is so good I rarely customize it even if it is possible. Winamp maker knows his stuff.
It is standard for most modern softwares UI, so it should also be for Unity.
The problem is that when they are stacked in that disposition they aren’t all grouped together under a single tab and rather occupy a lot of space.
But having multiple inspectors already does the job so it is fine.
I think there is a feature in the roadmap that will allow dragging components up and down in the gameobject’s inspector. This shouldn’t be in the roadmap, they should just implement it right away!
