Daikon Forge

Daikon Forge lets you edit your UI live in the scene editor and preview it in the game view.
Daikon Forge lets you edit your UI live in the scene editor and preview it in the game view.

Progress continues on Project Weasel, and last weekend I bought a license for Daikon Forge ($90 in the Unity Asset Store) after mulling over the Unity GUI situation for over two years (basically since Unity announced its new GUI system in San Francisco in 2011). Like many Unity developers, I’ve been waiting for Unity to fix its execrable GUI library for some time, and had avoided investing in nGUI, Daikon Forge, or Coherent because something better — and free — was coming out real soon now.

I reached the point where not having a functional UI library was blocking progress, so I decided I was going to buy a better UI library — the question was which one? nGUI has been the market leader, but from what I’ve seen the API is pretty terrible (and the fact that the nGUI dev is the guy building the new Unity GUI does not fill me with enthusiasm). Coherent — based on HTML5 — seems like a great idea, but according to reviews I’ve read it consumes quite a bit of CPU on mobile devices (and you’d expect it to, given that web browsers can tax mobile devices). From what I could see, Daikon Forge was the least expensive option and possibly the best (if not as widely supported as nGUI). It’s very well reviewed, including by quite a few nGUI refugees. It also struck me that the Unity GUI would probably be, in effect, an improved nGUI, so I’ll have the best of both worlds once it actually ships.

Anyway, so far I’ve found Daikon Forge is pretty nice but not without issues. But it’s worth noting that all of the weaknesses I’ve seen so far affect the developer and not the delivered product.

(Mostly) Good Stuff

I whipped up a 3d pinned information panel in less than an hour
I whipped up a 3d pinned information panel in less than an hour

To create a user interface with Daikon Forge you use a wizard to set up a “manager”. On the plus side, it works! On the minus side it’s a “wizard” — automatic fail. I’d prefer you to be able to drag a prefab into the scene, or drag a script onto a GameObject, or select a GameObject and pick a menu item. The sad thing is that there’s no reason it can’t work that way. Functionality A. Usability C.

Next, you need to assign a default skin and a default font to the UI gadget. In my opinion it should Just Work without this. (How? Easy — stick a default skin and a default font in a Resources folder and load them on the fly if needed.) This particular bit initially stymied me (the picker didn’t “see” the relevant assets), and I needed to find the relevant components manually and drag them into place. Functionality B. Usability F.

Daikon Forge makes creating and maintaining a UI atlas very easy
Daikon Forge makes creating and maintaining a UI atlas very easy
Using Sketch (this is the old version) you can whip up a UI skin in a matter of minutes
Using a tool like Sketch (this is the old version) you can whip up a UI skin in a matter of minutes

The tools for creating your own skins and fonts are almost brilliant. (Select the assets and pull a menu item — and you can easily add items to and remove items from your UI atlas any time you need to.) Functionality A. Usability B.

Next, you can right-click the UI “gizmo” in the scene editor and add controls to it directly. This also stymied me because the context menu does not work when your inspector panel is in debug mode, which mine happened to be in at the time. (Who knew?) Again, on the plus side it works, on the down side many controls come with idiotic defaults (e.g. huge or dimensionless). Functionality B. Usability C.

So I finally managed to get my Galaxy working so that I could click on a star and have a little information display pin itself to the star and show information like the name and spectral class of the star and how many planets it has orbiting it (and the display is not scaled, renders in a minimum of draw calls, and is pixel perfect, but is pinned to the projected 3d position of the star — very cool). On the downside, I found the documentation for binding values to controls to be incomprehensible, and did it all by brute force. Functionality C (so far). Usability F.

Bad Stuff

Every widget has a lot of properties, and they're not given sensible defaults
Every widget has a lot of properties, and they’re not given sensible defaults

First of all, there’s a big workflow problem. When I first imported Daikon Forge into my project it didn’t work properly (e.g. when I tried to assign a skin to one of Daikon Forge’s UI managers it wouldn’t find the relevant assets). This problem eventually “went away” (no idea why) but it was a sign of things to come.

Second, I keep my project in Dropbox and would work on it from my laptop and desktop at different times. When I switch machines, the other machine would load changed files and Just Work. But after I installed Daikon Forge this process became completely broken. Daikon Forge would become completely broken and need to be reimported whenever I switched machines. Worse, every script component assignment would become detached from its relevant script (only for Daikon Forge scripts) and have to be manually repaired. I don’t have a fix for this except to stop using DropBox, which might not be a Bad Thing.

Third, the documentation is good as a class reference, but bad as a guide/overview/cookbook. The tutorials are good but video only and somewhat lengthy. The examples are good but no substitute for actual documentation. Then there’s the website. To post on the website you need to register, and when I try to register it tells me my username or email address flags me as a spammer and that if I want to fix this I need to reply (how?) or use the contact form (where?). I tried my usual handle (podperson) and my usual email address, and my real name and my gmail address — all spammers apparently.

The WYSIWYG editing of your interface is great as far as it goes, but that’s not far. E.g. there are guides, but nothing snaps to them. There’s a grid but nothing snaps to it. There’s a tool to distribute multiple controls horizontally or vertically, but it doesn’t work properly. Worst of all, simply moving and editing things is very finicky. You can easily get into a state where the transform widget is overlapping some other control (e.g. a sizing handle) so that whenever you try to move a control you actually resize it. I ended up resorting to the keyboard for moving controls, and directly entering values for sizing them most of the time.

In a nut

Daikon Forge delivers on its promises in terms of functionality and performance. It renders user interfaces efficiently and attractively. It’s very easy to create and maintain texture atlases. And it supports scalable fonts. Furthermore, its design leverages idiomatic Unity development (e.g. you can make and reuse prefab controls in the obvious manner.) But it is far from perfect: ironically for a UI building tool, its own UI is spotty to put it charitably. Thus far I’ve found the website to be borderline useless and the documentation weak. I’m not sure if the video tutorials and examples really fill the gap (I haven’t had the time or inclination to watch all the tutorials).