Unity: Make the asset picker more powerful

One I've been thinking of is the popup that shows you a visual representation of game things:

1. As a view style for Project and Hierarchy

I'm not going to spend much time on this because it should be obvious. The Asset Picker is so much easier to see what the hell you're about to click on than the current icon/name view of Project and Hierarchy. The current icons in Unity are incredibly difficult to parse visually.  

I wouldn't want this view all the time, but  for certain things, it's a million times easier to grok this view at a glance than the current views. And it seems as though the hard part of implmenting this is already done -- just apply it as a view for Project and Hiearchy; or perhaps a 3rd panel that shows the contents of the current folder you've got chosen in Project.

2. As a Level Design tool

Again, I don't think the Asset Picker view is always the superior way to do it, but for most cases in my work flow, it would be so much easier.

Now, if the Project view supported this type of preview rendering, that would get us pretty close to what I'm looking for. 

But there's one thing that is missing from Unity, and that is more of a construction set workflow. Right now, every time you want to add a prefab to the scene, you've got to ther drag it out of the Project view and into Scene, or you've got to duplicate an already existing one in the scene itself. 

What I want is a "click to add" type of control that will allow me to place multiples in the scene without having to drag multiple times. Think about how SimCity or Rollercoaster Tycoon lets you add things to the world. It's just click, click, click.  The current method making you pogo-stick between project and scene, even when adding multiples of the same prefab.

I think it would work well as a tool, assigned to the T key by default. This would allow you to rest your hand on the qwert keys, and switch between moving (w), rotating (e), scaling (r), and adding (t). Perfect for rapid level design. 

Misc. notes

This is just my first pass at how I'd like it to work. I could just as easily see this as a level-design palette that lets you add items to Scene visually, even if Project and Hierarchy keep their text-only view. Basically implment the Asset Picker as is now, but open all the time, and showing prefabs from Project.  

But while I'm at it, here's some random notes about the current process: 

• Project view as it is feels quite unwieldy. I often just feel lost in a sea of folders and sub-folders, with these tiny icons that all look similar. 
• It would be nice if we could be shortcuts to certain folders and see JUST them using the Asset Picker view. The ability to have a palette with tabs for "power ups", "Buildings", "enemies", and to be able to ping-pong between them quickly, without having to deal with intermediary folders would be ideal. We can get close to this with a clever Project layout, but due to the tree-view nature of the project tab, it is very difficult to ping-pong between a set of folders.  A level design palette could solve this.

The lower 90%

My final thought on this is about what I call the Lower 90%. We have the upper 10% of features in an app, and these are the super-sexy marketing-ready features that wow users. 

Then we have the lower 90%. And these are not quite as sexy, but they're things we use all the time, on every project. Everything I've mentioned here are features every Unity user would use, on every project, and they'd use it all the time.  

And, as it stands, it seems like the big hurdles around a visual preview mode for level design (and for project and Hierarchy) are already done. I love Uunity and the entire UT crew. I hope this blog post inspires them to improve upon asset selection. It may not be as sexy as big shiny new features, but it seems like this is some low-hanging fruit that could really improve workflow for everyone who uses Unity.

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