Nova UI: assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/nova-226304?aid=1100lHSw Nova UI Free Version: assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/nova-free-trial-231156?aid=1100lHSw UI Toolkits forum post August 2022: forum.unity.com/threads/ui-toolkit-update-q3-2022.1329159/
Does Nova UI support runtime auto scaling? For instance, we develop mobile games and there are lots of resolutions we need to deal with like iPhone and iPad. If I make a UI working on iPhone, will it work on iPad too?
@@resulbilkil8567 Yes! Nova includes a ScreenSpace component, which provides a number of ways to handle different screen resolutions/aspect ratios for you automatically, depending on your preferred configuration. For example, there is a mode that will fix the height of your content and adjust the width based on the aspect ratio of the screen, and an analogous one that will adjust the height. Both of these are not dependent on the exact resolution of the screen but rather the aspect ratio and allow you to build your content as "horizontally adaptive" or "vertically adaptive". You can read more about Nova's different screen space fill modes in the "Screen vs. World Space" article in the manual of our website. That said, the best way to determine if Nova handles the kind of resolution changes you're looking to support would be to test it out with the free trial :)
Alright, I got very inspired by this video and I spent a whole day working with Nova UI. I should mention that I worked with both UGUI (Unity UI) and UI Toolkit before and I have a lot of experience developing non-Unity UIs for both web and desktop. Nova looks very promising but I have to say that it does not feel production ready at this moment. There are some features that I loved (or rather the lack of burden that is present in other approaches): positioning elements made easy, autoalignment for rotated elements, padding/margin tool and so on. Also very nice looking (and fast!) shadows and gradients. But there are features missing that I feel are absolutely required for a $129 UI Framework in a release state: - 9-slicing is not supported. So there is no way for you to make sprite-able borders for your menus. - Flex layout is not supported. UI Toolkit supports it out of the box and I'm pretty sure you could find open source implementations for UGUI online. - Image scaling options are very limited comparing to both UGUI and UI Toolkit unless you want to handle it with code. - Undo can sometimes mess up your state. Say hello to the early UGUI days. - Most of the controls you would expect are not present. You have to create them yourself. Example: to create a textbox you would need to create a good 4-level deep gameobject with 4 extra input handling MonoBehaviours on top of it (not counting Nova UIBlocks). That is the official way of creating textboxes. Of course you would prefab it but it still feels like A LOT for such a basic task. Same goes for nearly every other control you would normally expect just working. - Styling is not supported. To be fair - neither it is in UGUI, but UI Toolkit supports it out of the box. - I believe some of TextmeshPro shaders are not supported. Not too sure about this one. - You HAVE to add a custom InputManager script (there are examples of it in the official manual, and as the video mentions - some samples are included in the package). You would most likely have to manage it afterwards. This was not a deal breaker for me but it might scare off some of the new developers. - Some of the source code in the free version is obfuscated (I would imagine it is the same in the paid version but I don't know). I understand why this decision was taken (we wouldn't have had a feature-complete free version otherwise) BUT this might make debugging a lot harder in case there is a bug in the framework itself. With all that being said - this is a very young UI framework with very clean and extensible API. The support was also almost instanteneous and very clear. I have very high hopes for this package - it's just that I wouldn't recommend using it in production at this point. There are a lot of features missing that I'd expect being there and that official UI systems provide out of the box. I would highly recommend giving the trial version a go before you buy this package to see for yourself if it fits your needs at its current state.
@@TheNjordy yes, they have addressed most of the points I've mentioned, also making it open source since version 2.0. Right my main concern is community - there is much more examples, assets and tutorials for UGUI. ChatGPT will not consult you on Nova either. Hence there are way less premade controls and systems that you can integrate with Nova (e.g. I don't think asset store has any). That being said, I am giving Nova another go on my own project at this very moment. I still think this is a promising asset. It has been nominated for "Best Development Tool" by Unity this year. However, I would definitely not recommend to use it in production yet. Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem to have received the community support it aimed for, so it's unclear what the future for this asset is. God I wish UI Toolkit had more attention from Unity's side.
@@DotNetCookbook yeah, that's what I was thinking too -- I'm not even saying video tutorials, but in general, there are almost no videos about Nova on youtube, and google search doesn't pick up any buzz or much discussions. I've checked the manual and it seems way too short... I see they keep updating it, but it's a bit... dead-ish in terms of community
Wow, this is super helpful. My biggest pain point is creating UIs. It isn’t hard, it’s probably one of the easiest things to do. It’s just soooo tedious and seemingly for no reason (like many unity features). Definitely going to check this out. Right now I intentionally design games with minimal ui. This could be huge for me
Important note I felt deserved to be mentioned because I ran into this issue after purchasing. Nova currently only renders UI in world space and automatically scales it to fit the camera view, giving the appearance of rendering in screen space. This makes it a bit difficult to use Nova for UI that follows gameobjects around (e.g. health bars or menu options that appear next to characters).
You are right. Absolutely. This is an important point and can be surprising. But it’s not too hard to write a script that causes the ui to follow the camera - or simply make the ui a child of the camera. The nova devs provided examples for me. I’d happy to pass those on. The scripts also ensure the UIBlock fills the screen. Another option that I’ve been using is to create an overlay camera that only renders the UI layer. This allows the ui to be stationary along with the overlay camera while the scene camera is free to move. If I was to make a tutorial for nova it might be showing how to set up these two approaches.
Seems this is more in the line of modern web style ui systems. Unity’s own new UI seems similar to this. It’s still far from production ready though so if this is more complete it could be an alternative until Unity’s own finally (if Ever) gets done. Reason I would love it to be done is that tren the same ui used for editor is for the game and you don’t need to learn and maintain two concepts
I should also add to this, Nova now ships with a “screen space” component. This effectively creates a canvas just like with ugui. It’s still a new frame that takes some time and adjustment but this component solves a lot of issues.
reminds me 10 years ago, people praising NGUI over the builtin system. then unity integrated NGUI and it's funny this is hapenning again. I think the main reason responsive UI is difficult is because people need to clearly define what they want and stop coming up with incompatible requirement, and I'm affraid no framework can help with that.
While I have checked out Nova, I do think it's still cumbersome because it lives in the scene hierarchy. That's why I love the new UI Toolkit from Unity themselves, much better workflow with more people, much more familiar for UI designers coming from other tools.
This looks really cool. I will definitely check this one out. Adaptive layouts with standard Unity Layout Groups is actually down-right impossible and renders many visual glitches. For those who are short on cash, I will also recommend looking into Unity's "UI Toolkit" package. They are working on a replacement for the old UI system, which works more simularly to HTML and CSS if I recall. (Be aware that by the sounds of things, that framework is not feature complete yet. So treat it as a beta)
I looked at their Settings Menu demo, it is slick and nice to work with, but wow, my CPU and GPU climb high when even just doing nothing. It looks like every frame they are martialing all BlockUI elements into the Unity Burst system to recalc layout. It works great, but wow, this looks like it would drain a mobile battery fast and even strong PCs will be working to support this UI system; which would subtract from what the project could deliver for the actual scene.
Cool, I'll check it out! How come no mention of UI Toolkit? I'm not totally sure what the state of that version is right now. I lost track of all the new Unity features in the past few years...
Kinda of same here... Last I saw with UI ToolKit you got references to UI elements with strings. That pretty much did it for me. Maybe I don't understand how it all works or maybe it's been updated, but searching for things by their name does not see like a scalable or maintainable solution. I also think it's still not fully functional? Either way you're not the first to mention it. Maybe I should go and take a closer look.
@@OneWheelStudio You can indeed search for elements by name. (just like how you find nodes in a html page using javascript). I have been using UI toolkit for my project, and I love it. Coming from a web-development background. I found it very easy to write myself a little framework which allows me to use component based development. No need for looking up elements using the name. Each "module" which I call it, programmatically attaches elements to the nodes, and keeps references to them. So you can just loop through all attached components in the current module, and call functions on the controllers of those components. Very neat. Very much like how modern web-frameworks do it, like Angular/React/Vue
This sounds interesting. I’d love to see an example of this! If you want drop by the OWS discord or shoot me an email - you can find it on the channel about page.
Oh, gosh. You don't know how much we've struggled with canvas, anchors, rectangles, etc. UGUI should be replaced just like UNET. In a cooperative project, it causes even more trouble.
I spend so much time wrestling with UI I could have finished several games just trying to get it to work on one. And it certainly looks quite promising but oof that price tag though! I'm gonna have to save up or wait for a sale
You make a good case for trying Nova. I am not looking forward to dealing with Unity's next UI at all. I'm pretty used to the horrors of the current system but if I could find something better? That's more performant too? I'm interested. Maybe Nova will do a full input system replacement as well?
I think the paid version with the burst compiler is supposed to be super efficient. Can't say I've done any testing, but I certainly haven't seen any performance issues at all. As for the pain of UGUI, a co-worker and I were talking about it yesterday and wishing we could use Nova in our companies project - its years in the making and SUPER ui heavy so zero chance - but we can still dream ;)
Looks like this has a lot of overlap with Unity's new UIBuilder, so I'm surprised that you didn't compare them. I haven't researched Nova's capabilities besides this video yet, but UIBuilder can do everything demonstrated here.
Last I saw with UI ToolKit you got references to UI elements with strings. That pretty much did it for me. Maybe I don't understand how it all works or maybe it's been updated, but searching for things by their name does not see like a scalable or maintainable solution. I also think it's still not fully functional? Out of curosity I did a bit of research, here's a recent forum post by the developers. It's not super encouraging from my perspective. forum.unity.com/threads/ui-toolkit-update-q3-2022.1329159/
@@OneWheelStudio Yeah, the strings in UI Toolkit are not ideal, and when you spontaneously rename things in the editor it will break your code references. But other than that, it's leaps and bounds better than UGUI, and particularly superior for editor scripting vs IMGUI. What would be a more interesting comparison in terms of features would be between Nova UI and between the similarly-priced Doozy UI Manager, which is essentially powerful wrapper around UGUI. I currently use the latter for projects with more complex UI, and would be interested to see where Nova might be a better choice.
Done! Here you go: ruclips.net/p/PL7S-IAgf3dlVLFfkxpPOhYDMCt5qrU0PR And I'll be streaming today in a few hours: ruclips.net/video/DnGlnrd2Ofc/видео.html
yea.. infinite pool scrolling is a pain... i remember i had a project that needed the feature and i spent like a or two to make it happen...and at first I thought it was very easy to do...
I can see it as another feature that should be built-in into the modern game engine but somehow Unity is forcing you to buy an asset so they can make some profit from the asset store as well. Do you want to have a great terrain tool? Buy an asset. Do you want to have a nice water/river system? Buy an asset. Do you have something so basic as a UI system? Buy an asset. This is going nowhere and I have a feeling that Unity is not developing its own built-in systems mentioned above (and many more) because they prefer making money from the asset store.
The problem I see with this is that the UI Toolkit exists, which has all of these features by default, and it is made by unity. I remember it crashing under specific circumstances in earlier versions of the package, probably in preview, but I think it now should work much better, and it's free
I'm working on a short follow up video looking at UI Toolkit. It does seem to have some or maybe even many of Nova's features. But the workflow is VERY different and I think will be a real challenge for folks who don't know or don't like web design with css and xml. From what I've seen, I can't personally imagine UI Toolkit being my default UI choice within the next year or two.
@@OneWheelStudio With the UIBuilder its basically drag and drop, I was trying it out and I built a simple calculator app without tourching any XML or CSS. It generates de XML and CSS objects for ya. It is true that the workflow is still different, and theres some things like scrollview object pooling that you still need to build yourself, but its obviously possible if you need that functionality, and its much more performant as it doesnt use Immediate mode GUI drawing
Unfortunately it seems like the developer has abandoned it as they have gone completely silent with unresolved bugs. I ditched it and just learning how to utilize UI Toolkit instead for now, even though I did like NOVA.
I know very little about it - when I saw that strings were used to get references I tuned it out ;) Other folks have asked so I did a bit of research. Based on a recent post from Unity it doesn't seem like it's ready to go yet. Forum Post: forum.unity.com/threads/ui-toolkit-update-q3-2022.1329159/
I feel Nova is a great package, however I think it should be mentioned that the new UI document system from Unity addresses a lot issues with the old UGUI and is quite close to web development.
I took my pain to the next level - tried to do it all through code, with Unity's UI system. The anchors will destroy you. There are also things that only work if they are done before or after setting anchors, as far as code goes. You can imagine the frustration. I moved to doing most of it hands-on like most people do, but it's still messy.
I just started to use it, and the first impression is not good. I just can not set it right and make it work. Instead of anchors, now I have sizing issues. But let me see some tutorials from Nova, maybe those make things clear.
Understandable. It’s a whole new framework with ins and outs to learn. I’ve spent a good chunk of my work day today struggling with UGUI - I’m pretty excited to get to my personal project and use NOVA 😊 That said I know nova isn’t for everyone.
How does the input field go with things like passwords? UGUI automatically handles this with a dropdown and adjusts the field accordingly, it also has options for mobile ect, I don't think I would fancy trying to code up my own solution for all that
It looks like a great product, but that is a very steep price. I've gotten used to the Ugui system which is far from perfect, but I can get what I need out of it now and it didn't take too long to learn how to work around the quirks. It's great that they have a free demo though! I'll try out the free version but I would probably only get the paid version on sale.
Perspective from the U.S.: An employee could cost you $70-$90 USD an hour. An agency may run $120 - $250 USD an hour. If it meets your project's needs, this package could be 10x the price and still be considered affordable and save you money. The comments below pinning this package as "expensive" shocked me. For other countries: Petition the developer to adjust the pricing, so it's more reasonable. You can always reach out to the company and negotiate different rates. I do not believe the Unity Store binds package developers to an arbitrary exclusivity agreement.
I am really mind blow by this product. Sorry but from this video I don't see anything that unity UIToolkit and new input system cannot do. Yes it is superior to Legacy canvas in all the ways mentioned, but not comparing it to another Unity official product like UIToolkit is unfair. Don't get me wrong, this product seems to have tons of helpful scripts and tools, which is totally worth it and I have nothing against the product. Just missing important comparison that could help viewers to make better and stronger desision.
I’m working on a follow up video 😉 probably be another week but I’m try to get some comparisons. The tl;dr is if you know web design and like that workflow ui toolkit could be great - but it’s also still a wip.
@@OneWheelStudio Thank you, the comparison would make it great! I am happy to hear there will be an update. And I totally agree, the work flow is indeed different. And that should be great selling point in one way or another :)
"free trial"... the "trial" thing always tells me that it will work for a period of time, and then it will stop working. Please correct me if i'm wrong. Because if it is just "Free" version, would means that it has limited features, but free trials, i infers that it'll have full features for a certain time only.
It is a "free version." There are just two limitations. 1) It does not use the burst complier, which is a non-issue for the vast majority of use cases. 2) You can not export it to a standalone build. Inside the editor it is fully functional and as long as the devs continue to update it on the asset store it will work in your project. It is not limited by time at all.
@@OneWheelStudio Thank you for reply so quickly. When you say "can not export it to a standalone build", it means that if i want to build to PC version it won't work, right?
Looking at it on the store for half price (only $30), but best I an tell, it's no longer supported. So unfortunately I think I'll have to give it a pass. Too bad, it looks quite good - and that documentation is amazing.
@@OneWheelStudio Thanks for the reply! I'm trying the trial version currently, but couldn't get it work it visual scripting. Maybe with the API + custom nodes combo would work. Thanks anyway!
@@AdventuresOfAzeth I haven't used VS in a long time now, but I would imagine you'd need to add in the custom types to have access. You might hit up the devs in their forum (github). They're pretty responsive.
@@OneWheelStudio bought it. learning it :) Without your videos... unlikely. That's one of their biggest drawbacks, nobody is making videos/talking about it
129 dollar!! Holy cow that is way too much for my country. I wish they send me a free copy too :D Way too expensive cant affort and free version says it only work in editor so cant be useful.
I think it's insane that people frequently put out packages like this. Unity has bigger teams and core engine access, yet solutions that actually work and get developed in a reasonable timeframe are always third party packages. Nova seems really nice, but I probably won't pick it up. I never thought it's acceptable that basic features don't come with the engine itself. Honestly I am not even mad, I feel sad about this because unity has made a lot of improvements and strides but releases such as this are more a reminder of how they managed to currently have two broken ui systems, and one of them is glued together with tape and a third party asset they never improved upon or integrated properly. At least people have more options with this, my main problem is that as someone who does put out asset store content himself - I don't have a good way of using sharp looking ui in my packages. Using TMPro creates a lot of files that get shipped with your package for no reason, UI Toolkit gets super blurry as it lacks AA in many cases. Nova would fall into an even greater problem of creating dependencies with assets users don't own.
I don't find uGUI hard to use. It rather lacks important features. Once uGUI came out back in Unity 4.6, it was a huge improvement over IMGUI because of its WYSIWYG. But uGUI wasn't getting many feature updates. They should've continued to improve on this. Which is now too late, because they're working on a new UI framework called UI Toolkit. Features lacking in uGUI: - ScrollView needs a virtual view. i.e. only bind data to the thing you see. Having 1000+ items in a list shouldn't be a problem. - Databinding, quite important and never implemented. You always find yourself creating your own components to set the data. - Layout, uGUI isn't very great for a responsive layout. Especially not if you're designing for PC, tablet and mobile. You don't want to maintain multiple canvasses that fit the device but rather have the UI adapt to the device. - Soft Masking, uGUI's Mask component is based on a bit being 1 or 0. There's no soft masking. - Visual enhancements such as gradients, dropshadows, glows and blurs Once UI Toolkit gets the most wanted features, it sure will be a go-to UI framework imo. It doesn't deal with GameObjects. It has a virtual view, so handling 1000+ items is no problem. You can easily change the looks of the UI through USS (Unity CSS) or even create a whole theme around it. Things that are still missing are: world space UI, grid layout, improved data binding, masking and visual enhancements (gradients, dropshadows, glows, blurring). Unity's UI team is very small and with every update they have to be careful to not break backwards compatibility. Thus being really slow in development sadly. UI Toolkit > uGUI > IMGUI. They're improving but very slowly. imo they should just hire more ppl to the UI team.
Less camera and more hands on examples would be preferable. As far as I'm concerned you spent this entire video summarizing their landing page. Looks like a perfect 10 minutes of algorythm friendly content with little to no substance.
Bloody joke! A game engine that has a UI that doesn't work properly and you have to dole out money for a 3rd. party plugin!!! Same goes for the animion, DOTS Google Firebase broken code base etc. Switch to Unreal Engine. A game engine built by a passionate leader in the industry.
When it comes to UI, it's not much better with Unreal. Most games throw a third party plugin like Coherent UI on it, which just throws a literal headless browser over the game.
My goal was to make it clear I wasn’t being paid to make the video and that I would make money if the links were used. I have affiliate links in nearly every video they come from the asset store not the developers - the payout is an order of magnitude smaller than a sponsored video. Transparency was what I was after - sounds like it wasn’t quite achieved.
Nova UI: assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/nova-226304?aid=1100lHSw
Nova UI Free Version: assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/nova-free-trial-231156?aid=1100lHSw
UI Toolkits forum post August 2022: forum.unity.com/threads/ui-toolkit-update-q3-2022.1329159/
Wow. This is very exciting to see! Thank you for all the feedback and helping us spread the word about Nova!
Does Nova UI support runtime auto scaling? For instance, we develop mobile games and there are lots of resolutions we need to deal with like iPhone and iPad. If I make a UI working on iPhone, will it work on iPad too?
@@resulbilkil8567 Yes! Nova includes a ScreenSpace component, which provides a number of ways to handle different screen resolutions/aspect ratios for you automatically, depending on your preferred configuration. For example, there is a mode that will fix the height of your content and adjust the width based on the aspect ratio of the screen, and an analogous one that will adjust the height. Both of these are not dependent on the exact resolution of the screen but rather the aspect ratio and allow you to build your content as "horizontally adaptive" or "vertically adaptive".
You can read more about Nova's different screen space fill modes in the "Screen vs. World Space" article in the manual of our website. That said, the best way to determine if Nova handles the kind of resolution changes you're looking to support would be to test it out with the free trial :)
@@NovaUI Thank you 👍
Unity is going to approach you guys soon 🖤
Does nova Support ui blur
Alright, I got very inspired by this video and I spent a whole day working with Nova UI.
I should mention that I worked with both UGUI (Unity UI) and UI Toolkit before and I have a lot of experience developing non-Unity UIs for both web and desktop.
Nova looks very promising but I have to say that it does not feel production ready at this moment.
There are some features that I loved (or rather the lack of burden that is present in other approaches): positioning elements made easy, autoalignment for rotated elements, padding/margin tool and so on. Also very nice looking (and fast!) shadows and gradients.
But there are features missing that I feel are absolutely required for a $129 UI Framework in a release state:
- 9-slicing is not supported. So there is no way for you to make sprite-able borders for your menus.
- Flex layout is not supported. UI Toolkit supports it out of the box and I'm pretty sure you could find open source implementations for UGUI online.
- Image scaling options are very limited comparing to both UGUI and UI Toolkit unless you want to handle it with code.
- Undo can sometimes mess up your state. Say hello to the early UGUI days.
- Most of the controls you would expect are not present. You have to create them yourself. Example: to create a textbox you would need to create a good 4-level deep gameobject with 4 extra input handling MonoBehaviours on top of it (not counting Nova UIBlocks). That is the official way of creating textboxes. Of course you would prefab it but it still feels like A LOT for such a basic task. Same goes for nearly every other control you would normally expect just working.
- Styling is not supported. To be fair - neither it is in UGUI, but UI Toolkit supports it out of the box.
- I believe some of TextmeshPro shaders are not supported. Not too sure about this one.
- You HAVE to add a custom InputManager script (there are examples of it in the official manual, and as the video mentions - some samples are included in the package). You would most likely have to manage it afterwards. This was not a deal breaker for me but it might scare off some of the new developers.
- Some of the source code in the free version is obfuscated (I would imagine it is the same in the paid version but I don't know). I understand why this decision was taken (we wouldn't have had a feature-complete free version otherwise) BUT this might make debugging a lot harder in case there is a bug in the framework itself.
With all that being said - this is a very young UI framework with very clean and extensible API. The support was also almost instanteneous and very clear.
I have very high hopes for this package - it's just that I wouldn't recommend using it in production at this point. There are a lot of features missing that I'd expect being there and that official UI systems provide out of the box. I would highly recommend giving the trial version a go before you buy this package to see for yourself if it fits your needs at its current state.
Hi. Have anything from this list changed over the year, are you same opinion? Thx :)
@@TheNjordy yes, they have addressed most of the points I've mentioned, also making it open source since version 2.0. Right my main concern is community - there is much more examples, assets and tutorials for UGUI. ChatGPT will not consult you on Nova either. Hence there are way less premade controls and systems that you can integrate with Nova (e.g. I don't think asset store has any).
That being said, I am giving Nova another go on my own project at this very moment. I still think this is a promising asset. It has been nominated for "Best Development Tool" by Unity this year. However, I would definitely not recommend to use it in production yet. Maybe it's just me, but it doesn't seem to have received the community support it aimed for, so it's unclear what the future for this asset is.
God I wish UI Toolkit had more attention from Unity's side.
@@DotNetCookbook yeah, that's what I was thinking too -- I'm not even saying video tutorials, but in general, there are almost no videos about Nova on youtube, and google search doesn't pick up any buzz or much discussions.
I've checked the manual and it seems way too short... I see they keep updating it, but it's a bit... dead-ish in terms of community
I love when packages have free versions so you can try them out. Definitely looks much more intuitive than regular UI.
Adding the free version was a really smart move in my opinion. So glad they did it.
Wow, this is super helpful. My biggest pain point is creating UIs. It isn’t hard, it’s probably one of the easiest things to do. It’s just soooo tedious and seemingly for no reason (like many unity features). Definitely going to check this out. Right now I intentionally design games with minimal ui. This could be huge for me
Important note I felt deserved to be mentioned because I ran into this issue after purchasing. Nova currently only renders UI in world space and automatically scales it to fit the camera view, giving the appearance of rendering in screen space. This makes it a bit difficult to use Nova for UI that follows gameobjects around (e.g. health bars or menu options that appear next to characters).
You are right. Absolutely. This is an important point and can be surprising. But it’s not too hard to write a script that causes the ui to follow the camera - or simply make the ui a child of the camera. The nova devs provided examples for me. I’d happy to pass those on. The scripts also ensure the UIBlock fills the screen.
Another option that I’ve been using is to create an overlay camera that only renders the UI layer. This allows the ui to be stationary along with the overlay camera while the scene camera is free to move. If I was to make a tutorial for nova it might be showing how to set up these two approaches.
Seems this is more in the line of modern web style ui systems. Unity’s own new UI seems similar to this. It’s still far from production ready though so if this is more complete it could be an alternative until Unity’s own finally (if Ever) gets done. Reason I would love it to be done is that tren the same ui used for editor is for the game and you don’t need to learn and maintain two concepts
I should also add to this, Nova now ships with a “screen space” component. This effectively creates a canvas just like with ugui. It’s still a new frame that takes some time and adjustment but this component solves a lot of issues.
Thanks for your Nova review and also the comparison with the UI Toolkit. Helps me move forward on my next prototype.
If you are interested in Nova (and don’t know) it’s 50% off at the moment.
@@OneWheelStudio thank you. Yes I just bought it.
Oh my god I'm not crazy for thinking the Resolution changing and complicated set up garbage?!? Thank god I need this
reminds me 10 years ago, people praising NGUI over the builtin system. then unity integrated NGUI and it's funny this is hapenning again.
I think the main reason responsive UI is difficult is because people need to clearly define what they want and stop coming up with incompatible requirement, and I'm affraid no framework can help with that.
While I have checked out Nova, I do think it's still cumbersome because it lives in the scene hierarchy. That's why I love the new UI Toolkit from Unity themselves, much better workflow with more people, much more familiar for UI designers coming from other tools.
Looks like an excellent tool. I'm going to play around with the free version and see what I can learn.
This looks really cool. I will definitely check this one out.
Adaptive layouts with standard Unity Layout Groups is actually down-right impossible and renders many visual glitches.
For those who are short on cash, I will also recommend looking into Unity's "UI Toolkit" package.
They are working on a replacement for the old UI system, which works more simularly to HTML and CSS if I recall.
(Be aware that by the sounds of things, that framework is not feature complete yet. So treat it as a beta)
I've been using UI Toolkit for a few projects now. Besides missing TMPro support, it's pretty much production ready.
@@thatanimeweirdo Great to hear. It's been almost two years since I looked at it. I was just going by one Unity's roadmap reports for 2023.
This is a very good introductory video. thank you! 😄
Excellent review, so I changed my mind. I'm gonna give NovaUI an oportunity to replace my UGUI interfaces adn teach it to my students. Thanks.
Thank you for doing this video and to the Nova team for making a serious quality item!
Huge fan! Thanks for the insight bud!
But seriously I did not know the tool I'm probably grabbing it during this holiday. Thanks for sharing!
I looked at their Settings Menu demo, it is slick and nice to work with, but wow, my CPU and GPU climb high when even just doing nothing. It looks like every frame they are martialing all BlockUI elements into the Unity Burst system to recalc layout. It works great, but wow, this looks like it would drain a mobile battery fast and even strong PCs will be working to support this UI system; which would subtract from what the project could deliver for the actual scene.
Cool, I'll check it out! How come no mention of UI Toolkit? I'm not totally sure what the state of that version is right now. I lost track of all the new Unity features in the past few years...
Kinda of same here... Last I saw with UI ToolKit you got references to UI elements with strings. That pretty much did it for me. Maybe I don't understand how it all works or maybe it's been updated, but searching for things by their name does not see like a scalable or maintainable solution. I also think it's still not fully functional?
Either way you're not the first to mention it. Maybe I should go and take a closer look.
@@OneWheelStudio You can indeed search for elements by name. (just like how you find nodes in a html page using javascript). I have been using UI toolkit for my project, and I love it. Coming from a web-development background. I found it very easy to write myself a little framework which allows me to use component based development. No need for looking up elements using the name. Each "module" which I call it, programmatically attaches elements to the nodes, and keeps references to them. So you can just loop through all attached components in the current module, and call functions on the controllers of those components. Very neat. Very much like how modern web-frameworks do it, like Angular/React/Vue
This sounds interesting. I’d love to see an example of this! If you want drop by the OWS discord or shoot me an email - you can find it on the channel about page.
Thanks for sharing this UI framework, man. UGUI is nasty and we need a serious alternative.
Yes we do! The developers are still adding features and I've got a request or two, but I think Nova is a viable alternative. for lots of developers.
Oh, gosh. You don't know how much we've struggled with canvas, anchors, rectangles, etc.
UGUI should be replaced just like UNET. In a cooperative project, it causes even more trouble.
Layout group torture antidote - lolol, now that's a hook 🤣
You must be the guy who made tutorials for Odin. Thanks man, It helps a lot.
Yep that me. Glad the videos are helpful.
I really appreciate this video. Thanks for the break down
How is it compared to the new Unity UI Toolkit?
Not calling the paid version Nova: Super seems like a missed opportunity
I spend so much time wrestling with UI I could have finished several games just trying to get it to work on one. And it certainly looks quite promising but oof that price tag though! I'm gonna have to save up or wait for a sale
You make a good case for trying Nova. I am not looking forward to dealing with Unity's next UI at all. I'm pretty used to the horrors of the current system but if I could find something better?
That's more performant too? I'm interested.
Maybe Nova will do a full input system replacement as well?
I think the paid version with the burst compiler is supposed to be super efficient. Can't say I've done any testing, but I certainly haven't seen any performance issues at all.
As for the pain of UGUI, a co-worker and I were talking about it yesterday and wishing we could use Nova in our companies project - its years in the making and SUPER ui heavy so zero chance - but we can still dream ;)
For input systems, I highly recommend Rewired. Amazing plugin. Worth the price.
Looks like this has a lot of overlap with Unity's new UIBuilder, so I'm surprised that you didn't compare them. I haven't researched Nova's capabilities besides this video yet, but UIBuilder can do everything demonstrated here.
I was wondering about the same thing, why not compare with UI Toolkit? Seems to be more similar.
Last I saw with UI ToolKit you got references to UI elements with strings. That pretty much did it for me. Maybe I don't understand how it all works or maybe it's been updated, but searching for things by their name does not see like a scalable or maintainable solution. I also think it's still not fully functional?
Out of curosity I did a bit of research, here's a recent forum post by the developers. It's not super encouraging from my perspective. forum.unity.com/threads/ui-toolkit-update-q3-2022.1329159/
@@OneWheelStudio Yeah, the strings in UI Toolkit are not ideal, and when you spontaneously rename things in the editor it will break your code references. But other than that, it's leaps and bounds better than UGUI, and particularly superior for editor scripting vs IMGUI. What would be a more interesting comparison in terms of features would be between Nova UI and between the similarly-priced Doozy UI Manager, which is essentially powerful wrapper around UGUI. I currently use the latter for projects with more complex UI, and would be interested to see where Nova might be a better choice.
@@jefflynch can you create joystick for mobile games using UI builder?
Always wanted to watch those streams but can't seem to find them anymore.
Can you please build a playlist so we can watch them.
Done! Here you go: ruclips.net/p/PL7S-IAgf3dlVLFfkxpPOhYDMCt5qrU0PR
And I'll be streaming today in a few hours: ruclips.net/video/DnGlnrd2Ofc/видео.html
the nova ui sounds great to use.
yea.. infinite pool scrolling is a pain... i remember i had a project that needed the feature and i spent like a or two to make it happen...and at first I thought it was very easy to do...
it worked! thank you so much!!
Relatable video title, love it!
Right!?! While not perfect Nova has been a huge pain relief.
I can see it as another feature that should be built-in into the modern game engine but somehow Unity is forcing you to buy an asset so they can make some profit from the asset store as well.
Do you want to have a great terrain tool? Buy an asset. Do you want to have a nice water/river system? Buy an asset. Do you have something so basic as a UI system? Buy an asset.
This is going nowhere and I have a feeling that Unity is not developing its own built-in systems mentioned above (and many more) because they prefer making money from the asset store.
The problem I see with this is that the UI Toolkit exists, which has all of these features by default, and it is made by unity.
I remember it crashing under specific circumstances in earlier versions of the package, probably in preview, but I think it now should work much better, and it's free
I'm working on a short follow up video looking at UI Toolkit. It does seem to have some or maybe even many of Nova's features. But the workflow is VERY different and I think will be a real challenge for folks who don't know or don't like web design with css and xml. From what I've seen, I can't personally imagine UI Toolkit being my default UI choice within the next year or two.
@@OneWheelStudio With the UIBuilder its basically drag and drop, I was trying it out and I built a simple calculator app without tourching any XML or CSS. It generates de XML and CSS objects for ya.
It is true that the workflow is still different, and theres some things like scrollview object pooling that you still need to build yourself, but its obviously possible if you need that functionality, and its much more performant as it doesnt use Immediate mode GUI drawing
Unfortunately it seems like the developer has abandoned it as they have gone completely silent with unresolved bugs. I ditched it and just learning how to utilize UI Toolkit instead for now, even though I did like NOVA.
I'm going to try this out, I HATE Unity's layouts. They're black magic and so touchy. Drives me nuts.
What do you think of the Unity UI toolkit versus Nova ?
I know very little about it - when I saw that strings were used to get references I tuned it out ;) Other folks have asked so I did a bit of research. Based on a recent post from Unity it doesn't seem like it's ready to go yet. Forum Post: forum.unity.com/threads/ui-toolkit-update-q3-2022.1329159/
I feel Nova is a great package, however I think it should be mentioned that the new UI document system from Unity addresses a lot issues with the old UGUI and is quite close to web development.
If we are lucky Unity will see and buy/copy this.
I took my pain to the next level - tried to do it all through code, with Unity's UI system. The anchors will destroy you. There are also things that only work if they are done before or after setting anchors, as far as code goes. You can imagine the frustration. I moved to doing most of it hands-on like most people do, but it's still messy.
UGUI does really get messy. If Nova was only a custom and more functional inspector thrown on top of UGUI it would still be a huge improvement.
I just started to use it, and the first impression is not good. I just can not set it right and make it work. Instead of anchors, now I have sizing issues.
But let me see some tutorials from Nova, maybe those make things clear.
Understandable. It’s a whole new framework with ins and outs to learn. I’ve spent a good chunk of my work day today struggling with UGUI - I’m pretty excited to get to my personal project and use NOVA 😊 That said I know nova isn’t for everyone.
How does the input field go with things like passwords? UGUI automatically handles this with a dropdown and adjusts the field accordingly, it also has options for mobile ect, I don't think I would fancy trying to code up my own solution for all that
I haven't tested it but it looks like they have a "secure" toggle to mask the text.
It looks like a great product, but that is a very steep price. I've gotten used to the Ugui system which is far from perfect, but I can get what I need out of it now and it didn't take too long to learn how to work around the quirks. It's great that they have a free demo though! I'll try out the free version but I would probably only get the paid version on sale.
Perspective from the U.S.: An employee could cost you $70-$90 USD an hour. An agency may run $120 - $250 USD an hour. If it meets your project's needs, this package could be 10x the price and still be considered affordable and save you money.
The comments below pinning this package as "expensive" shocked me.
For other countries: Petition the developer to adjust the pricing, so it's more reasonable. You can always reach out to the company and negotiate different rates. I do not believe the Unity Store binds package developers to an arbitrary exclusivity agreement.
* $129 per seat
Ah yes the famous quote from Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang: "It just works."
What is the difference between nova and unity's ui tool kit? I like to control my ui with code for easy flow
They're pretty different in terms of work flow. I'm working on a follow up video ;)
I am really mind blow by this product. Sorry but from this video I don't see anything that unity UIToolkit and new input system cannot do. Yes it is superior to Legacy canvas in all the ways mentioned, but not comparing it to another Unity official product like UIToolkit is unfair.
Don't get me wrong, this product seems to have tons of helpful scripts and tools, which is totally worth it and I have nothing against the product. Just missing important comparison that could help viewers to make better and stronger desision.
I’m working on a follow up video 😉 probably be another week but I’m try to get some comparisons. The tl;dr is if you know web design and like that workflow ui toolkit could be great - but it’s also still a wip.
@@OneWheelStudio Thank you, the comparison would make it great! I am happy to hear there will be an update. And I totally agree, the work flow is indeed different. And that should be great selling point in one way or another :)
i love how u blur ur search history
Price drop to $40 now on sale $20
"free trial"... the "trial" thing always tells me that it will work for a period of time, and then it will stop working.
Please correct me if i'm wrong. Because if it is just "Free" version, would means that it has limited features, but free trials, i infers that it'll have full features for a certain time only.
It is a "free version." There are just two limitations.
1) It does not use the burst complier, which is a non-issue for the vast majority of use cases.
2) You can not export it to a standalone build.
Inside the editor it is fully functional and as long as the devs continue to update it on the asset store it will work in your project. It is not limited by time at all.
@@OneWheelStudio Thank you for reply so quickly. When you say "can not export it to a standalone build", it means that if i want to build to PC version it won't work, right?
Correct. If you want to make a PC build you will need the paid version. But you can experiment and play around with all the in editor features.
Looking at it on the store for half price (only $30), but best I an tell, it's no longer supported. So unfortunately I think I'll have to give it a pass. Too bad, it looks quite good - and that documentation is amazing.
Hi there! Does someone know how well Nova works with Unity Visual Scripting?
No idea honestly. But it’s free now, or the free version is fully functional so give it a try!
@@OneWheelStudio Thanks for the reply! I'm trying the trial version currently, but couldn't get it work it visual scripting. Maybe with the API + custom nodes combo would work. Thanks anyway!
@@AdventuresOfAzeth I haven't used VS in a long time now, but I would imagine you'd need to add in the custom types to have access. You might hit up the devs in their forum (github). They're pretty responsive.
I have my reserves from buying UI tools for unity. the last time I've spent hundreds, they changed the ui system and it's all deprecated now.
A year later, are you still the same opinion?
Yep. It’s not perfect and it does take time to learn, but I have zero regrets. I’ve been using it in my personal project for over a year. I’m sold.
@@OneWheelStudio bought it. learning it :) Without your videos... unlikely. That's one of their biggest drawbacks, nobody is making videos/talking about it
Looks really good and promissing but at least for me it's way too expensive. :)
But UIToolkit tho
Why does everyone keep saying " At the end of the day" it's like the new "[problematic". These cultural mems are so transparent.
Well, at the start of the day I haven't said it much. But! By the end of the day... I've said it a lot. :P
its now 60$
❕❕❕❕❕
The free version is non fully functional too!
$129 for 129 person or just one?
I would assume it’s just like all asset store license and it’s per seat price.
129 dollar!! Holy cow that is way too much for my country. I wish they send me a free copy too :D Way too expensive cant affort and free version says it only work in editor so cant be useful.
And he been in my sa situation obviously
I use Flutter
40$ is cool price for this, if it is that good.
The free version now offers everything but human readable code. So even easier to give it a try!
damn this is really expensive..
I think it's insane that people frequently put out packages like this. Unity has bigger teams and core engine access, yet solutions that actually work and get developed in a reasonable timeframe are always third party packages. Nova seems really nice, but I probably won't pick it up. I never thought it's acceptable that basic features don't come with the engine itself. Honestly I am not even mad, I feel sad about this because unity has made a lot of improvements and strides but releases such as this are more a reminder of how they managed to currently have two broken ui systems, and one of them is glued together with tape and a third party asset they never improved upon or integrated properly.
At least people have more options with this, my main problem is that as someone who does put out asset store content himself - I don't have a good way of using sharp looking ui in my packages. Using TMPro creates a lot of files that get shipped with your package for no reason, UI Toolkit gets super blurry as it lacks AA in many cases. Nova would fall into an even greater problem of creating dependencies with assets users don't own.
WebGL not supported, would get it if it did. shame
They are taking feature requests. Could be worth asking?
I don't find uGUI hard to use. It rather lacks important features.
Once uGUI came out back in Unity 4.6, it was a huge improvement over IMGUI because of its WYSIWYG.
But uGUI wasn't getting many feature updates. They should've continued to improve on this.
Which is now too late, because they're working on a new UI framework called UI Toolkit.
Features lacking in uGUI:
- ScrollView needs a virtual view. i.e. only bind data to the thing you see. Having 1000+ items in a list shouldn't be a problem.
- Databinding, quite important and never implemented. You always find yourself creating your own components to set the data.
- Layout, uGUI isn't very great for a responsive layout. Especially not if you're designing for PC, tablet and mobile. You don't want to maintain multiple canvasses that fit the device but rather have the UI adapt to the device.
- Soft Masking, uGUI's Mask component is based on a bit being 1 or 0. There's no soft masking.
- Visual enhancements such as gradients, dropshadows, glows and blurs
Once UI Toolkit gets the most wanted features, it sure will be a go-to UI framework imo. It doesn't deal with GameObjects. It has a virtual view, so handling 1000+ items is no problem. You can easily change the looks of the UI through USS (Unity CSS) or even create a whole theme around it.
Things that are still missing are: world space UI, grid layout, improved data binding, masking and visual enhancements (gradients, dropshadows, glows, blurring).
Unity's UI team is very small and with every update they have to be careful to not break backwards compatibility. Thus being really slow in development sadly.
UI Toolkit > uGUI > IMGUI. They're improving but very slowly.
imo they should just hire more ppl to the UI team.
Less camera and more hands on examples would be preferable. As far as I'm concerned you spent this entire video summarizing their landing page. Looks like a perfect 10 minutes of algorythm friendly content with little to no substance.
Both legacy Unity UI and UI Toolkit suck, so I'll give Nova UI a try
ABANDONED! So sad...
why do we need to see your face the entire time ? show the UI
UI Toolkit is the best if you know html and css.
Bloody joke! A game engine that has a UI that doesn't work properly and you have to dole out money for a 3rd. party plugin!!! Same goes for the animion, DOTS Google Firebase broken code base etc. Switch to Unreal Engine. A game engine built by a passionate leader in the industry.
When it comes to UI, it's not much better with Unreal. Most games throw a third party plugin like Coherent UI on it, which just throws a literal headless browser over the game.
wtf? Not a sponsored video but if we want to support the channel we can buy nova using your sponsor link?
My goal was to make it clear I wasn’t being paid to make the video and that I would make money if the links were used. I have affiliate links in nearly every video they come from the asset store not the developers - the payout is an order of magnitude smaller than a sponsored video. Transparency was what I was after - sounds like it wasn’t quite achieved.
First?
Why?, am i dying
Yeah.. but Unity sux, no amount of UI will fix that
minimum wage in my country: ~$227
cost of unity asset: $129
This prices are not designed for my country 🫤
It's a real problem. It would be interesting if Unity could do regional pricing like Steam does.