I’ve been working with the next gen studio ui for the last few weeks, just as today.
30 minutes ago I opened up studio to resume work, only to be met with…
Despite having the next gen ui beta enabled, I’m met with the old interface.
The center of the screen shows the introduction to the next gen ui, despite the legacy one being loaded.
( ! ) The beta toggle for next gen ui is completely missing under the “Beta Features” tab.
Next gen UI feedback
No need to respond to this, but here’s what I instantly noticed when I was forced to the legacy UI due to the aforementioned:
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Using the next gen UI, I noticed a constant struggle to access or find information in the spur of the moment, whereas I did not have this problem with the legacy UI. Initially I figured this was a case of getting used to the new layout, but having had this enabled for at least a month now I’m confident this is an issue with how the legacy UI is perceivable as “function and form” compared to the next gen’s “form over function”. Information – buttons specifically – have so much unnecessary padding. Yes, this can be reduced by enabling compact mode, but this gets rid of the text as well which is counter intuitive. I’m forced to live with the padding if I want to be able to know which does what. My eyes have to constantly dart across the screen to find something, whereas in the compact legacy ui this was much more relaxed.
Lastly, buttons that were previously accessible in the legacy ui are now hidden behind customization. I’m happy for the ability to customize ribbons and toolbars in studio, but doing so feels unnecessarily slow and I’m not sure whether this is by design or a technical limitation.
While working with customization I longed for:
the ability to drag a ui item into the toolbar from the selection window
the ability to rearrange ui items in the toolbar by dragging. currently I don’t know any other way than to delete items and reinsert them, which is so slow…
Confusion because that’s definitely not the next gen ui.
Excitement because for a few seconds I thought they actually improved the layout of the next gen ui
We will continue tweaking the layout. Truncation is going to happen one way or another but we can keep making it better. A lot of things moved to menus and we tried to follow some logic here (need to change a View or Window? It’s likely under the View or Window menu.)
We also enabled tooltips for as many things as we could so you can mouse over things to get full descriptions. There were a couple lingering issues with tooltips but I think we have the actual fixes done and on the way.
Form and function are relative to the user. For highly experienced creators like yourself, you are used to everything being on a tab. For a new creator, it can be extremely overwhelming and confusing. They also don’t know enough about the environment to know what they can customize — so starting with the “kitchen sink” full of tools is not the right approach.
We would also love drag and drop editing of tabs. We just had to spend the time getting the customization system up and running first. You can right click on a tool and select “Move Left” or “Move Right” — it’s still a bit painful but easier than deleting and re-adding. Alternatively, if you’re comfortable working in JSON, you can just build up a tab in a file and then select “Reload Tabs” in the Manage Tabs panel. You can also duplicate any tab (right click on the tab) as a starting point for a new custom tab.
Fair point actually. I can’t remember which engineer said it or where, but they’re doing an A/B test where some users (not all) now have the new UI to see how it performs in the wild. So it’s not rolled out to everyone yet—I guess that’s why it’s not worth announcing
I appreciate the care that’s being given to ensure new creators can get used to studio more easily.
This resonates with me as well, because I had a much easier time getting into game development the moment I started working with Godot despite having worked with Unity a year prior – the former embracing a similar philosophy you guys seem to adopt with the new UI.
I’m often a bit blunt with my feedback, but I know the intentions from the engineers are in good faith and that everything takes time, so please take it with a grain of salt!
