What about UI Toolkit? - UI in Unity

Is UI Toolkit ready to use? How does it compare to UGUI or Nova UI? Should you use UI Toolkit in your next Unity project? Let's talk about the pros the cons and some things in between.

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UI Toolkit Links:

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Timestamps
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0:00 Intro
0:38 Development Timeline
1:53 Pros
3:06 Cons
4:42 Toss Ups
5:55 My Experience
8:59 Should You Use It?
9:53 My Suggestions

#GameDevelopment #Unity3D #indiedeveloper

[Tarodev]

String lookups are a huge problem. Rider has a nice feature where they'll throw a warning when a scene string is not found in the current scene list... This would go some of the way to alleviate the downside. Another option would be a generator to create an enum list or something, but that would require script compiling for each new element, which is ew.

Frameworks like WPF do it really well by providing instant IDs on the view backing script, seemingly instantaneously. Maybe something to look into.

[JonLamont]

Thanks for the video - very thorough and I really love your video format.

[anyavailablehandle]

Thanks for that. Such a clear explanation🙂

[Kaiymu]

I'm using UITK for 2 years now on a huge project and honestly, the pro and cons that you give are straight on point.
My main issue right now is related to animation, for the rest of it I find it really amazing to use it. The fact that you can override VisualElement and make your code run in Editor and runtime is truly amazing.

I would just add one thing on your "Should you use UITK / UGUI / Nova UI", it would be "Do you need a Visual Tool ?".
The fact that UITK is WYSIWYG was an amazing thing for me because I'm working with artist that needed visual feedback. Whereas UGUI is quite static and you need to play your game to get proper feedback.

[purplevincent]

Personally I love ui toolkit. But I'm also coming from web development. I can imagine for those that aren't it's an entirely new skill to have to learn. I just hope this doesn't turn into another deprecated unity solution because of the mixed reviews.

[dave]

Great video. I put UI Toolkit back away quite quickly. For example I opened up a UI Document, create an element. Tried to set the relative position to 10% left and 10% right...and the element is off the screen (i tried negative 10% too just in case)....if something so simple as setting a % position of an element is difficult then this thing is going to be an absolute chore. The perform also seems to be shocking; am adding a copy of test UI documents to my game the performance tanked.

[lyrion]

At least a current con for me: didn't get TMP Font Assets to work, as far as I googled: not supported yet.

[Betruet]

I watched the whole thing but that tldr was great 👍

[ShiloBuff]

The lag in UI Builder is probably redrawing the element(s) when you change its opacity or whatever else you are change. Not exactly reasonable but it does make more sense in that case.

[okamichamploo]

You're point about whether or not you are familiar with web development is so true.
I watched another toolkit video and they described it as being so simple, but all the web terminology just threw me through a loop and a few minutes in I had no idea how the things they were doing were connecting or where the things they were referring to were in relation to a game space, and I couldn't figure out how to break apart the visuals and customize them with my own, etc.

[tuseroni]

one thing that is...frikken hard to find but really useful is the debugger for the ui toolkil. it can be a pain in the ass sometimes to see why something is the way it is (like in my case my entire ui was only taking up about a third of the screen, in the ui builder it seemed fine, but in game view it was 1/3 of the screen. what happened was i had a selector for "TemplateContainer" and i guess the whole thing must be in a templatecontainer when added to the game. and my selector had a width of 33%

no matter what system i use i struggle making UI because i'm just not that good at art and by extension ui. im more of a functional kinda person a "i need a thing that will call this function" sorta person. i want it to look good but have no idea how to do that and little idea when i've accomplished it.

[malgab]

Hey there. Is there any integration with Figma to UIToolkit that you know?

[blindsidedgames]

I really enjoyed this video, I do however think your slider issue is related to your hardware or something. I loaded it up on mine and changed that slider without any issue or lag spikes.
I think I faced a lot of the same issues you did with UITK Figuring out how to edit premade styles is something I still haven't worked out and the severe lack of documentation makes it really hard to google.

[GeniusPancake]

I use ui toolkit mainly for Editor Custom Tool creation. Nothing else. Since I can visually see how I am creating them and easily adapting them it makes it worth it.

[gtlan]

One thing I hate about ui toolkit is the buggy "constant pixel size" panel setting, otherwise if fits well into my workflow and I'm from web development.

[odo]

One of the things I liked with the UGUI over the newer UI Toolkit is that UGUI is not static. It constantly refreshes making updates to the UI much more fluid and easy to deal with. But, that is also a problem as it can lead to slower performance and bloat if not done correctly.

[pushthebutton]

How is the performance with Nova in Unity?

[tst]

I tried porting a menu from my game to UI toolkit as an experiment and decided two things: I think it is great for what it can offer, though I think it is not ready for production yet.

[remus-alexandrusimion]

I have mixed feelings about both the old UI methodology and this newer one.
I love the speed at which i can do my layout and the most basic stuff using UI Toolkit. I have very little webdev experience, mostly coming from my university years, but i felt it was enough. I don't however like the way you can use a scrollable container. It feels needlessly convoluted. I also don't like the way user input is handled. I've had a disabled UI pop back into existence because the events taking certain inputs were still hooked. Took me like a week (i'm a newbie hobbyist) to figure that stuff out.

I hope they work on it a bit (a lot) more and make it more user friendly AND hopefully allow it to play nice with the old way of doing things. It has a lot of potential and despite the different workflow from the standard Unity one, i feel like once people get the hang of it it will really make stuff better UI-wise. Faster to draft a UI (probably the same to get the nitty gritty stuff going), decoupling of the UI from the game itself, all that stuff is really nice. But it's not exactly the perfect system right now and this IMO hurts it in the long run because it slows transition to it. Maybe to the point of stopping it altogether if they keep delaying development of it.

[Deadener]

Thanks for letting me know that UI Toolkit is still completely unusable for any kind of serious production. I'll check back on it in a year or two.