Create better Editor and game interfaces faster with UI Toolkit | Unite 2023

We’re constantly evolving the UI Toolkit to put the best UI tools in the hands of our users. Watch this video for expert guidance and valuable techniques to level up your UI skills. We show you how UI Toolkit can elevate and speed up teamwork with the new data-binding system, innovative UXML objects, and tailored inspectors in UI Builder. Don’t miss this opportunity to transform how you design and create UI for both the Unity Editor and games.

Speakers:
Benoit Dupuis, Senior Technical Product Manager, Unity

Unlock success for your game, however you define it:

#unity #gamedev #uitoolkit

[gfujigo]

Also, please make tutorials for all of this and add this to the documentation.

These improvements look really good.

[GameDevGuide]

Really love the improvements made in the 2023.2 updates. It used to be so painful before and so it was difficult to recommend, but I've been playing around with them recently since watching this talk and its now much easier to work with and build custom elements. Solid work here. Hope you keep the improvements coming to reach parity with current runtime ui features.

[joshstubblefield]

This is great! Fixing string based references, data binding, and world space UI. This was my wishlist for UI Toolkit. Now I’m excited to dive back in.

[InstantCasette]

I've been building lots of UI with UIToolkit for the last 6 months, and overall I'm quite happy with it. The only sore spots like UXML traits, keyframed animation, shaders & world space rendering all look to be resolved in the near future. (we kinda REALLY need those things this year.) I used to builds lots of game UI with uGUI for desktop, mobile & VR the past 8 years. Theming & styling, responsive UI & flexibity was always an issue that basically forced us to build our own systems to handle this. These are things that seem core to UIToolkit and work very well. 👍

[Kaiymu]

Thank you for that amazing presentation, it gives so much more flexibility to the already amazing tool !
Well played :).

[niuage]

Daaaamn. I've been using UI Toolkit for a long time now and while being great most of the time, I've really felt the issues mentioned and more. Super happy about those changes.

[BlackMesaEmployee]

new data bindings setup from uibuilder is a massive win.

[mirkobilmirpayziev]

I'll start using UI Toolkit as soon as they support shaders, materials and make using masks easier.. add mask support guys.. this is fundamental for UI.. right now you should SVG file etc.. yack...

[hldfgjsjbd]

Damn this speaker needs some water. After 6 minutes, the anticipation of mouth clicks began to drive me nuts.

[bnaZan]

Data binding is great!
When will you start recommending UI toolkit for production? Is UI toolkit becoming the new dots?
Also just a reminder that unity still has the pixelated text as default and not TextMeshPro.
Are you ever going to remove that old pixelated text and automatically replace it with TMP?

[niuage]

Finally got to a point where I can upgrade to a UI toolkit version that has those changes and sooo ready to get to use them. I have to give props to the presenter here. It's so clear, great examples, really good all around.

[neomatrix]

I also suggest you develop the easy use of particle also in the UI and loading screen... It would be magical.

[MadDev_]

Noice!
Please Unity bring world space rendering as soon as possible

[sebastienalbert]

UI toolkit is still painful but attractive. I'm really waiting for UI in world space.
Improvements look reasonable and on the good path.
Link to ui sample project ? is Daragon crashers still relevant ?

[mikkelens]

data bindings being programmable and not only manually stringly typed finally brings UI toolkit past that of imgui. If I’m diving into unity tool dev then I’ll try it out

[zORg_alex]

What I want is an UXML/USS editor right under the designer, so I won't need to edit it in VisualStudio and close and reopen to see changes from designer. I am used to Visual Studio WPF, that I can write it easily with intellisense and have more complex things done in few clicks in designer, or things I keep forgetting are called. This makes writing UI much faster and squeaky clean.

[Armitage]

Keyframe animation, UI Shaders, RTL and World Space Rendering are only in development!
I hope the performance will surpass that of NeosisGui & co. With such a fast-moving market, it's becoming difficult to invest solely in a technology limited to a single engine.

[btarg]

This seems like a more complex and roundabout way of doing an HTML templating language. Facepunch implemented Razor into their game s&box, why hasn't unity done something similar to make the syntax easier and more unified? It's definitely an improvement however, hopefully it continues to get better.

[danielmcbride]

UI Toolkit is promising, but it is still quite a ways off. I tried using it for about a year. The "css" stand-in is still missing many key features. The inability to render things with perspective was the final straw for my team. No particles. No shaders. If you want something in-game to appear in your UI, you have to render an additional camera onto a render-texture and make it the background which more than negates any performance benefits you would gain from using it.

That being said, I think it is the future for UI in Unity. While it is a learning hurtle, the isolation from GameObjects became my favorite feature. It really could use some better support for custom drawing capabilities. The reusability of each component is amazing as well. The improved development velocity can't be understated either.

[rafarodriguez]

Fancy program but I see it as too much complication to solve an easy problem.
It is easy to create buttons in one minute in any art editor software, no need to be an artist to achieve so.
So, as an overwhelmed developer (like every dev) to have to study a new program to get something that we already have, I consider that it is not practical.
What are your thoughts about that?