Unity Technologies has released its User Interface (UI) Toolkit, which combines several new features, tools, and resources for developers designing graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
The toolkit first appeared in its 2019.1 release as UI Elements, and version 2021.2 facilitated the production of runtime UI, which allowed developers to build UI for games and apps in Unity.
UI Toolkit builds from previous generations with similar authoring experiences, along with dedicated tools such as the UI Builder and UI Debugger, among others.
What’s Added in the New UI Toolkit?
The platform recently integrated font rendering from TextMesh Pro, permitting users to avoid installing additional plugins and packages in version 2021.2, to style text from any point size and resolution.
A dedicated UI animation system has added state change transitions to the platform, which offers options for transitions applied to UI projects, saving developers time and energy, and also works seamlessly with Unity UI to transition current projects without rewriting whole user interfaces.
Developers can also set parameters such as colour, size, border radius, and text, to textureless UI via the Toolkit, bypassing the need to create and import images from programmes such as Photoshop.
The new features reduce memory footprints as well as the requirement for full-screen anti-aliasing to retain quality and boost performance, the company added.
More on the UI Toolkit Update
UI Toolkit should be used by developers producing a high workload with a large number of UIs, projects familiar with artist and designer workflows, and creatives seeking textureless UI features.
People interested in the beta can download UI Toolkit from the Unity Hub or download pages, but Unity has advised against it for production-stage projects.
Developers are encouraged to leave feedback on the Beta and UI Toolkit forums.
The news comes after Unity announced new quality-of-life features for its 2021.2 release, including Scene Viwew UX updates, custom toolbars for adjusting scene tool parameters, as well as an Apple Silicon Editor for M1 chipset Mac users, among other additions. NVIDIA Deep Learning tools were also added to offer improved VR framerate performance, to reduce fatigue from lower-quality framerates.
