This is part of a series of posts revolving around user interface design and development, the introduction and links to the other posts can be found here.

With this post I want to talk about my first impressions when using Unity 4.6 Beta 18, specifically relating to uGUI. Everyone should realise that uGUI is still in beta and is improving with every beta release. I’m sure a lot of issues will be fixed but my post will be a snapshot of how things are now and my thoughts. As a side note to tie up my previous posts, with the death of Daikon Forge and no longer any hope of DF-GUI v2 we’re moving full steam ahead with uGUI. With that, let’s get to it.

I’ve been using uGUI, Unity’s long awaited new user interface framework, for the past week. I’ve been developing Techyard’s (Solitude’s mod / dev tool) new user interface with it. Generally it’s not been a too painful experience but I’m making slower progress than I had hoped. Part of this is the usual learning curve of a new middleware but also due to the current state of uGUI.

uGUI is excellent in that it’s free and integrated into Unity. What I am most happy with is that Unity has decided to open source uGUI on the official release of Unity 4.6. This is amazing news as there is already an active community forming around uGUI and, with community involvement, I fully expect some excellent extensions and modifications to appear. Even during the past week people have been sharing some excellent scripts to supplement the framework.

The system is relatively easy to use from the Editor and makes use of a visual anchor system that seems to work pretty well. Exact position can be a bit of a pain though as dragging the anchors never gives exact positions – it’s all very ‘close enough’, which isn’t nice. Corrections are always needed in the components if you want exact numbers. Since Solitude will create most of its UI programmatically I think the anchor system might be more of a foe than a friend, but I haven’t done enough 100% programmatically to say for sure yet. Scaling seems to work fine, even if it’s basic support right now, but aspect ratio support could do with some extra work. Luckily, Unity have mentioned scaling is a focus soon and, hopefully, this will include better aspect ratio support. While images can be selected to maintain their aspect ratio I think this functionality would be very useful at a higher level.

Currently uGUI provides a few basic UI components but little to none of the more complex ones. Most of my time has been recreating the more complex UI components in a reusable way and converting the previous Daikon Forge UI to uGUI. I’m been making decent progress on this so the Techard UI work should speed up as times goes on.

Like most Unity-based UI frameworks, small things exist that annoy. The main thing I get tired of is that you can’t increase the size of a UI panel without scaling the content inside it too. Imagine when you create a panel then realise you want to add more content into it. Resizing the panel scales the content inside, even when the anchors are not set to scale. This use-case can be a pain. There may be a trick to unhooking the anchors before you do this but I’ve seen this exact behaviour with all UI frameworks and it’s a pain. The only ‘fix’ is to remove the content from the panel, resize the panel and then add the content back in. Hopefully Unity, or the community, come up with a better solution (or I find my mistake). I’ll probably look into this issue in more depth soon. Things aren’t bad, just fiddly.

Performance seems good for now. uGUI has better CPU performance than Daikon Forge but the draw calls can be a bit higher depending on how things have been set up previously. Sometimes a single draw call on NGUI / Daikon Forge can come in at four draw calls. I have a feeling things get better for uGUI with more complex UIs though so I’m not worried about this at all. Render order is taken from Unity hierarchy order so this change will be new for a lot of people. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen what is a rendering order bug but need to submit that to be sure of it.

All in all, it’s great to see the shift in Unity’s closed communication attitude of the past few years. The past six months have seen Unity allowing their team to talk much more openly about what is going on. This is very evident in the Unity 4.6 Beta forum where Unity are taking a lot of time to help developers having issues with uGUI. This is a good sign for the future.

I’ve had my fair number of problems with uGUI but it’s only the second week of the beta. If I’m completely honest I would have hoped that uGUI would be in a better state considering how long it has taken them to make. I guess recoding it three times over does tend to reduce a feature set. I do have to keep reminding myself it’s still a beta and not to be too harsh though. A lot of these problems will be sorted out so we’ll be sticking with uGUI for the immediate future. It’s probably worth using uGUI if you’re starting a new project but I wouldn’t recommend ripping out UI in an existing project just yet. It’s great to see Unity take positive steps on the UI and I look forward to the source being released.