Share Your Thoughts!

[adgray1]

As we continue to improve Nova and aim to expand the Nova community, we want to hear from all of you about your experience with Nova so far!

A couple of questions to get some feedback brewing:

1. What was your initial impression of Nova after using it for the first time? Did you run into any pain points?
2. Are you still using Nova? Why or why not?

Any other impressions/thoughts/feedback you'd like to share? Positive or negative, we genuinely want to hear it all, so please comment below and let us know!

[Arcfalt]

I was in the middle of evaluating different UI solutions including potentially making our own for a VR project at my company because UGUI just wasn't cutting it in terms of performance, when we just happened to stumble on Nova from the post on Reddit, and gave it a shot.

First impressions were extremely positive, great performance and great architecture, absolutely fantastic layout and scrolling support being a highlight. Our biggest reservation was what would happen in a theoretical future where it stopped getting updates, given the obfuscated source and such. That being said, it completely excelled in all our tests and the only actual pain point we ran into was already posted by someone else in the feedback list when I came here to report it and was fixed near immediately (animations originally running off scaled time instead of realtime). Ultimately we decided it was worth moving ahead with.

So yes, still using Nova and intend to use it for all the UI in the project (unfortunately can't really give a concrete example since it's something still pre-production) but so far it has been excellent every step of the way for development and if everything goes to plan I hope to keep using it!

[ronjart]

I picked up this asset for my next big Unity VR project - mostly because I was disillusioned with Unity's built in offerings and slow/uncertain progress on UI toolkit for the VR usecase.

It does feel like a risk using a 3rd party asset for what could be considered a core system, especially looking at the fact that the product is relatively new and from what it seems like, not widely used. All that being said, the product looked very promising and the team behind it seems to have the right credentials. It was great to have a demo version to check things out.

I'm just starting to go beyond the very basic usecase and so far I'm very happy with it all - the animation system in particular was a breath of fresh air! I also haven't done much profiling for the UI system in particular so I hope all the claims are true :) which is a huge plus.

What will ultimately make this a success for me (or not) is whether the asset will stay compatible and somewhat supported over the coming years. I certainly hope that it will become a great success for the developer's as well as mine.

[j7j7]

I've only started with Nova, and I'm currently evaluating it for my game, to move the whole UI to a simpler, sleek UX.
So far the design elements look intuitive, and sizing buttons etc all work how they should.

For me, we need more prefab examples, especially with animations.

I've come to pay and use unity assets such as from people like Michsky ( https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/gui/modern-ui-pack-201717 )- which have a lot of 'prefabs' which you can very quickly insert, refine, and get going without too much work.

Animating menus, buttons, sliders, and dropdowns (change size on hover, fade borders on selection, etc) would go a long way to show how this can be done quickly and easily without code in Nova.

I learn a lot by examples, and so although there are a few GitHub repositories for Nova, I'm still struggling to get anything more than the basic button working. (I couldn't get the VR one working, which was as shame as that seemed to show more visual effects)

I'm not too much of a native coder (I use Playmaker for most of my workflow) so I like to 'wire up' functions rather than having to write my own C#. I've spent quite a bit of time creating 'glue' C# functions to interact between natives and Playmaker.

I'm probably still going to buy Nova and push through the learning curve, but would love to see more examples to show the art of the possible!

Thanks for creating this asset - it's what unity needs, even with the new framework that's coming - this looks far more what a UI designer needs.

Jason
http://hitstream.games

[drew-512]

Hi @adgray1

First impressions:

• Nova is AMAZING and what I've been looking for. Bless y'all for taking on all this AND doing it in a way that leverages the strong parts of Unity!
• I have gone through all the stages of grief with Unity's existing auto layout system. I am sincerely astonished they have not pursued a next-generation UI framework such as Nova (perhaps this is the business path!?). In my frustration, I had been chipping away at a (significantly lesser) version of Nova -- my UIBlock was called UICell :)
• Fabulous job on the docs! Informative as well as gorgeous. Very pro! My only comment would be the video time lapse is a bit fast, even at .5x for someone like me following along to learn the workflow.
• When I saw the lighting support I got super excited, but then I saw it was only for SRP. I'm crossing my fingers that basic URP lighting support will come eventually? Is a workaround to just stick quads or sprite renderers on UIBlocks?
• Brilliant work on the data model and grid scrollers. My hope is that many others will eventually realize this towers over every other UI package available for Unity. I've have bought / tried every UI asset in the Asset Store that claims to be a code solution. They have either abuse Update(), carelessly burn cycles, or are non-extensible.
• LOVE the use of ECS and Animation support. Christmas in January!

I learned about Nova from One Wheel Studio and Code Monkey -- thanks!

For context, about me:

• Indie dev, shipped music visualization software for 20 years to pay rent, licensed it to Apple for iTunes (G-Force)
• Built and maintained the realtime 3D engine in C++ that targeted DX9 and OGL for our visual products.
• 15 years C++ (will never go back!), 5 years Go, 3 years Unity
• Would love to contact you privately and share more about how I think Nova fits in with what we're working on and contributions I see us making contributions to Nova and showing you what we're doing with this nifty embedded Go<->Unity bridge we've made.

[jiristary]

Hello, about a moth ago I decided to evaluate Nova and after quite thorough testing I switched UI solution of my personal project to Nova. During that time I wrote down some notes and I would like to share that with you:

First of all, I would like to thank you guys for an awesome UI solution. I am generally very happy with it so far except for few things stated below.

Things I love ❤️

• Layouting works like charm, I didn't have single issue
• Love Padding/Margin and Position and Sizing options
• Professional code quality
• Very nice Scroller/ListView that supports different item types and item sizes as well as resizing of elements in runtime. It is easy to set up both in editor and from code (once you get the hang of the basic concept of ItemView, Visuals etc.).
• Tint option in ClipMask
• More code-centric approach to UI elements might not suit everybody but I like it. I was able to buit my own controls and views/widgets handling on top of Nova with ease. The ItemView/ItemVisuals/UIControl decoupling feels a little bit too much at times but I understand it has some very useful usecases.

Things I hate ☠️

• Source code is obfuscated. The obfuscation goes above and beyond what I originally imagined. Not even Unity itself obfuscates their codes so much. I would love full source code just for the sake of future proofing (it is a big commitment to switch to a proprietary UI solution, you might close your business any time and we might be stuck). If full source code is not an option, I would at least expect the “first-line components” aka UIBlock, UIBlock2D, ListView,... to be unobfuscated. Seems like having full source code available works for other assets even with complicated internals (Animancer comes to my mind as a great example), I don’t know why it shouldn’t work for Nova 🤷

Things I miss 😢

• Custom UI shaders
• No WebGL support
• Text outline does not work (TextBlock does not support text outline with different color than text itself), I haven't tested drop shadow
• Text size units do not correspond with units in design programs
• Option to scale the sprite to its original (intended by designer) size - this should also respect import settings (pixels per unit)
• "Linear Fill" is missing. Workaround by changing radial fill center works but is awkward to set up.

Issues 🐛

• Blurry hint text when modifying input fields in UIControls sample input field and then deleting the input text
• GridView (haven't tested ListView) - Setting empty list as data source, populating that list and then calling Refresh does not work even though GridView.DataSourceItemCount correctly detects count > 0.
• The InputManager that comes in NovaSample.UIControls has invalid touch input when using custom UI camera -> there is access to Camera.main instead of specified camera

Questions ❓

• Only Mobile versions of TexMeshPro shaders are supported?

Suggestions 💡

• ScreenSpace component - Support for “Width & Height” with a slider similar to UGUI would be nice
• Ability to convert UIBlock to UIBlock2D and vice versa (component menu?)
• Child element can ignore Auto Layout of the parent - Not sure if this will not break Nova’s internals or simplicity. As a workaround more hierarchical elements need to be created.
• When dragging UIBlockTool resize handles to resize block, it would be great if holding ALT would resize the element from center (as it is standard in graphical applications)
• ItemView does not have multi-object editing allowed -> changing visual values (e.g. hover/pressed/default colors) for multiple objects is slow.
• ClipMask multi object editing not supported. Why?
• Would love to have more shapes - N-gone (e.g. from triangle to octagon)
• I was surprised there is no direct scroll animation support (e.g. ScrollTo method) for ListView but I was able to make it work very quickly with help of the included animation handle system and I was shocked it works just like that. However I feel like the ItemList has too few public properties - I can imagine at least some kind of current scroll position value if it makes sense from an internals perspective. Without it I had to do the scroll animation by stepping through the desired delta instead of just lerping between start and target scroll value. But maybe that is also the reason why it works so well even though the elements are resizing during the scroll 🤷 😁

[drew-512]

Great post -- I resonate with much of that as well.

On the TMP shader thing, I suspect that shader was chosen to make TMP efficiently work in their schema, given that it is effectively a world space schema.

[drew-512]

Child element can ignore Auto Layout of the parent - Not sure if this will not break Nova’s internals or simplicity. As a workaround more hierarchical elements need to be created.

Is there an update on this? This feature as well as an intractable flag are sorely missed features from Unity's Canvas system.

This absence of said ignore in layout is particularly distracting since using auto-layout means that also adding any background or adornments result in a deeper UIBlock hierarchies and additional layout complexity and/or code.

It was difficult to see things like blur effects added while basics are yet to be addressed. Maybe I'm missing something? My understanding is that Nova sets out to be a replacement for what Canvas offers.