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Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?

#11

Post by catmanjan »

dleslie wrote: post #6

Unity will never have halfway decent audio, networking, or ui; and not for lack of trying. The problem is that the one size fits all approach that made then successful falls far short of ideal in areas where there simply isn't a good general case for all of the possible use cases of unity. For UI, is because no single approach is suitable for all possible combinations of glance, grasp, touch, gamepad, mobile, PC, VR,…

At the moment Unity has one size that fits no one though

Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?

#16

Post by Shadonototra »

multiple reasons

- it's hard to make declarative UIs with C# (recent versions try to make it easier, but it's still not there)

- making UIs is hard, making game UIs is even more hard because there is no rule to make a UI, it depends on many factors (art style, game genre, platform you target, input you support)

- making something customizable, serializable and performant is very hard

you are better making your own that suits your need, hence people rely on 3rd party solutions that exactly solve their use case

Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?

#18

Post by redefine_net »

Shadonototra wrote: post #16

multiple reasons - it's hard to make declarative UIs with C# (recent versions try to make it easier, but it's still not there) - making UIs is hard, making game UIs is even more hard because there is no rule to make a UI, it depends on many factors (art style, game genre, platform you target, input you support) - making something customizable, serializable and performant is very hard you are better making your own th…

I don't get why they don't make HTML-compatible frames you could just rotate in 3D. in my mind - if you said UI you said HTML. (and JS and CSS)

Re: Ask HN: Why is UI design in Unity so hard?

#19

Post by shetill »

The native UI framework and even paid assets are absolute rubbish. I've actively avoided working on these as I realised how difficult and unproductive it is. Especially Editor UIs and Property Drawers is the worst. They have so many projects on Preview (like their supposed new UI system) and has stayed like this for years... disappointing. I've thought on switching to Unreal for long time but never went with it knowing I have to learn C++ too and also Unreal feels very heavy compared to Unity. Some might suggest something like Godot but these kind of engines are still nowhere near the same level as the two giants and their asset stores are either non existent or at infant level. Marketplaces are important for me.
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