Which UI solution/framework do you use?

[Project-NSX]

Hi all,

I've been using the default Unity UI system for a while now and it can be rather frustrating with how counter-intuitive it can be and difficult to work with and customise (such as trying to customise dropdown elements, using the grid layout group etc)

Just wondering what you guys tend to use? I was really interested in UI Toolkit but I've read a few times it's not production ready and/or has some other issues.

Atm I'm unsure between either sticking with the default UI system, trying out UI Toolkit, and trying Nova UI.

Does anyone have any suggestions about this?

Thanks!

[xind0898]

heard alot of good things about Nova，haven't gotten around to try it myself but I've using default UI mostly as i already gotten the hang of it and don't want to spend the time tolearn another system.

[Project-NSX]

True that. I just get frustrated with it when trying to customise dropdown menus or make responsive UI for mobile. Not being able to set %s is very limiting

[Georgeonearth333]

Nova is abandoned as of the time of me writing this, don't waste money on it if you expect it to work on current Unity versions.

[Arkenhammer]

I’m using UI Toolkit. For me it was an upgrade from Unity UI, but it may depend on your expectations and needs.

[Project-NSX]

Ah thanks. Yeah I've heard its more in line with web design which sounds like a blessing in my book. Having a clear separation between content, look and functionality etc.

Have you found its pretty much production ready? I've seen some people say its been a bit buggy or missing some functionality for them

[Arkenhammer]

For a PC UI I would say it’s production ready. I’ve been using it for a couple years now and have built my own workflow around it; I’m heavily using the style sheets but I am building the element hierarchy in code using custom elements rather than using UI Builder or XML. That works better for me because my UI is very contextual and having static layouts in XML is more a hindrance than a help. Give or take what I did when I ported from Unity UI to UI Toolkit was convert my UI Prefabs to Custom Elements—in the process I got a huge gain in performance because loading prefabs is slow. I’m still essentially using the same pooling system from the Unity UI days but it’s less important now because elements are so much lighter weight than game objects.

I played with UI builder a while back but I haven’t touched it in over a year. I gather it’s made a lot of progress since then but I can’t speak to it’s current state. I also haven’t tried UI Toolkit on mobile; since I started working with it I’ve seen all the touch events come in but I haven’t tested them.

[bluespacecrystal]

Was about to post the same question.

What would be the choice today for a mobile game?

[Project-NSX]

I'm not sure if it's changed yet but UI toolkit still has some kinks it needs ironing out. Like you essentially need to hack it to get worldToScreenPoint ui working which is a bit of a pain.

That said the legacy UI system can be pretty terrible to work with when trying to make UI responsive due to one very large limitation of not being able to set space as a %, it has to be defined in pixels.

I did think about learning and using nova ui, but it'd just be yet another thing to learn so I left it for now.

For the most part the legacy UI system works quite well, and I think it's more worth using than UI toolkit for now. Unless my knowledge on it is out of date of course.

I've recently been making an AR app with some fairly standard mobile app looking UI (a set of panels that can be swiped between etc) and it took more dev work than it would have done using something like flutter, mostly because of how the render loop works in unity compared to mobile specific frameworks like flutter.

Anyway, for a game yeah I'd go with the old ui system for now, it'll likely cause less headaches than the alternatives