Where did the UI team go?

Is the new UI system perfect or where did the UI team vanish? I have been following Unity patch notes and very rarely there are any fixes for the new UI reported. Is it already so good immediately after release or did they fire the UI team?

 

We are still here . We've just been swamped with bug fixes and not many of them get have been getting notes. Its something i'm going to start looking into as we need to be better at communicating what we've fixed.

 

Also, are planned any new features? Because since 4.6 we are only going to see two or three minimal features in 5.2 (performance, dropdown and mask I think) and there isn't any mention in the roadmap between 5.2-5.4 (and we are talking about march 2016).

 

Thats something we need to sit down and work on. We really have been swamped with bugs we peaked at 323 bug earlier this year and we are down to 171 as of this morning. Now that a good chunk of bugs are out of the way we can really start to prioritize other things. I know we have looked at Tooltip, Text generation, and 2D/ UI collaboration such that the systems play nicer together. Will any of these make it onto the public roadmap, hopefully soon but I dont want to promise anything if we get side tracked by other work.

 

Add particles to that collaboration list

 

I am glad you realize that the lack of UI communication is an issue. If we could just get a couple of roadmap features, I think that would go a long way to give us something to look forward to! (signed-depth text rendering, particles, etc.)

 

Thank you for stopping by. I am happy to hear it is due to heavily working on it that there has been not much news on the patch notes instead of the opposite.

Keep up the good work, love the new UI system!

 

Maybe you all can rewrite the backend eventsystem too. It quits calling the GraphicsRayCaster after the second time I press play.

 

yes - it's Case 719980. It's intermittent. At one time it worked when I went to full screen. Now it doesn't work at all.
its' not just me:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/un...econd-time-i-press-play-unity-5-1-2f1.347814/

Also, sometimes the text is green (and ONLY the text) when the color is set to white. Also intermittent. Not just me either.

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/green-text-comes-and-goes.349701/

These intermittent things are strange. Obviously something is wrong in the shader, as the material and gameobject look correct.

 

Yes, please write that blog post! Any communication out of the UI team is better than none. Let the people know what you're working on and what you explained here. That you're working on getting a solid foundation to build new features on. I think you should follow the model of the 2D team. They seem to have spent a good chunk of time stabilizing for the remainder of the 4.x cycle and then now they're cranking out some really neat new features left and right.

I'm also still waiting on that tell-all book about the trial and tribulations of the Unity UI system's past, present, and future!

 

Checking the latest release notes there is now plenty of UI related information! Thanks for taking the time and reporting what is going on <3

 

10 months passed and still nothing is really happening in UI realm (in public at least) except of (small) bug fixes.
Anything to share?

 

I have not encountered too many bugs anymore on the UI. Maybe about new features, there was something on the pipeline for 2D system in general?

 

There is nothing about GUI on the Roadmap. So no new features in the near future I guess.
The new 2D stuff just got a Experimental Preview though.

 

The UI team certainly has gone very quiet, but they do seem to be grinding through the bugs. They did say that they would spend this year stabilizing the UI and fixing as many bugs as they could find in their foundation and writing a lot of UI tests. I'm glad that they've done so. Seems like the massive "Things are completely unusable" during the 5.2/5.3 cycle has died down considerably. So it seems that they're doing much better? There hasn't been major UI complains in the 5.4 beta either from what I can tell.

I'm sure we all have wishlist features, but based on what I see on the forums the most common complains are:

Better font/text rendering (text is blurry/scales poorly)
Better performance (UI shader performance compared to Sprites-Default)
Nested Prefabs (Not a UI issue, but it's really annoying for UIs)

 

Yes it be good to know whats the latest and whats being worked on?

 

So major 5.5 release has "rootCanvas property" feature and 5 (five) bug fixes...
UI seems alive and well

 

I can assure you we did more then 5 bug fixes, Not 100% sure why they arn't on the release notes, but looking at it i'll need to investigate what we are doing in our process that we didnt get them in the notes.

Good news is we have features in the works for 5.6 along with more bug fixes.

 

What about text rendering? You (or Tim Cooper) said ages ago that it used a legacy system that wanted to change. Look at Text Mesh Pro, Unity should have that features built-in.

Also, it would be nice to see some of this scripts into core:

https://bitbucket.org/ddreaper/unity-ui-extensions/wiki/Controls

Like UIFlippable (or a simple checkbox to flip a Image like SpriteRenderer has), FlowLayoutGroup and effects like "Gradient". I have mentioned "easier" scripts or features to implement.

Also, what happens with pull-requests?

https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/ui/pull-requests/

There are requests like this that has many comments with no Unity staff response:

https://bitbucket.org/Unity-Technologies/ui/pull-requests/45/scrollrect-sticky-content/diff

If you want community to help adding new features or enhancing existing ones, please answer that requests because if you don't do it, people it's going to get tired of working with new pull-requests and getting no answers.

You need to work on this hardly.

 

That's really good news.
Any more info to share, will they be available in 1st beta?

 

Are there any major changes how "UnityEngine.UI/EventSystem/InputModules/StandaloneInputModule.cs" works with the EventTrigger system? In 5.4 I used this great solution to create a virtual cursor and it worked just fine, but in 5.5 the PointEnter event trigger works only when user presses any of the mouse buttons, not when the cursor enters the UI object.
Will the UI bitbucket be updated to 5.5 any soon?

 

Yes we are looking into doing a better text system asap. No news yet but its heavily on our minds.

I'll spend some time going through and seeing what makes sense to migrate.

Yes PR have been one place where we've dropped the ball. The UI team is finally up to full strength and have gotten out from under the pile of bugs we had. That had been our focus so everything else, (PR's, features, ect) had been left. The idea is still to take them though likely wont be till the new year something can start to happen.

 

I think I can share them now. So one feature is custom additional shader properties on the Canvas. ATM a canvas mesh would have Position, Colors, Normals, Tangents, UV0, and UV1 all defined by default and packed into the vertex buffer. The issue was 95% of the time, Normals, Tangents, and UV1 channels were never used and utilized. This feature fixes that by allowing you to specify which channels you want including new UV2 and UV3 (added them as why not )

The other feature is a UI profiler. Its a new column in the profile window that gives you a bunch of data about the Canvas and its batching results such as which objects are contained in which batch, what a specific batch renders like (in our preview window), event markers that mark out important events (button click for example) and other nice things.

 

There should have been no changes to the EventSystem that would have caused this issue. I know there was one fix done recently around sorting event order in relation to nested canvases but i'm not 100% that landed in 5.5

And sure i'll put it on my list for today.

 

While better text system isn't there can you add interface for Text component and use it for stuff like Drowpdown or InputField? So this way people using TextMeshPro (really a lot of them!) can use those components directly instead of making source copies and replacing Text references to TextMeshPro?

 

Yes there is that thought which would be the quicker fix.

 

The 5.5 branch of UI won't compile, it looks like you forgot to add several new files to the repository required by revision 97.

BaseInput.cs and ReflectionMethodsCache.cs were both missing.

Changeset: 297538b49d72ed5bdb1487b58d971bda252f6214

 

Yup i missed those (they were buried in a bunch of other untracked files.) Its been corrected.