[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
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Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?
I love Unity , but they've been working on UI frameworks for almost
a decade , all fall short. Still I need a 3rd party asset to make
a decent UI
Author : 41209
Score : 11 points
Date : 2022-02-20 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
| lostgame wrote:
| What's wrong with it? I prototype UI's all the time in Unity with
| no issues? In fact I love the anchoring system?
| ffhhj wrote:
| Some history: years ago someone at Unity got in love with one of
| those 3rd party assets, NGUI (if I remember correctly), they
| started reproducing it inside the engine and realized there could
| be problems of interest, so they contracted the asset developer,
| but relegated him to do boring stuff. The guy got depressed and
| left the company.
|
| Having worked with the older GUI system I actually like what they
| have now. But I'd have prefered them to adopt CSS.
|
| Now they bought all those inhouse tools from Peter Jackson they
| will be busy for years to come plugin them. Someone's dream in
| Unity is making movies, not UIs.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I'm building a graphics framework based on polygons set into a
| honeycomb (doesn't have to be a hexagonal honeycomb [0]) -
| basically you specify a coordinate system, then describe polygons
| as paths along those coordinates, and then embed text and media
| within those polygons (flowing the text, clipping the media) --
| especially excited about flowing text around arbitrary paths
| (like you can do in Inkscape/Illustrator but in 3D)
|
| I'm targeting HTML/CSS because it's what I understand, but always
| imagined I could use the same markup to render in VR / game
| engines. It would be valuable to me if you described what
| primitives you expect Unity to give you, and how you wish it
| worked. Sorry if this is hijacking the thread since I don't have
| the answer, but I would love to have the answer eventually :)
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convex_uniform_honeycomb
| swalls wrote:
| As you dive deeper into Unity, you realize more and more flaws.
| They promise the world, but only deliver marketable features
| rather than improving what they've got. The UI Framework is just
| one of those things.
| dleslie wrote:
| Unity will never have halfway decent audio, networking, or ui;
| and not for lack of trying.
|
| The problem is that the one size fits all approach that made then
| successful falls far short of ideal in areas where there simply
| isn't a good general case for all of the possible use cases of
| unity.
|
| For UI, is because no single approach is suitable for all
| possible combinations of glance, grasp, touch, gamepad, mobile,
| PC, VR, adaptive web, and with all possible projections and
| rendering approaches. There may be some commonalities, but no
| package is going to be great at all those things.
| catmanjan wrote:
| At the moment Unity has one size that fits no one though
| lkschubert8 wrote:
| Honestly this is my experience with ui in most, if not all, game
| engines.
| toivo wrote:
| Whats a better UI framework? Been a unity game dev since I
| learned to program properly so I don't even know any better.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| I have found unreal's basic ui editor to be fine.
|
| Unity is, in my opinion, just a poorly managed company with a
| good product in spite of it. They've failed to deliver on many
| things and the engine has glaring weaknesses, e.g. no networked
| multiplayer built in. I would bet on the engine generally getting
| worse over time as management tries to push non functioning new
| stuff.
| wilg wrote:
| UI Toolkit is a big improvement over the previous ones, at least.
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