Odin Inspector Roadmap




Ongoing Work        Research        Work not yet started

Overview of Update 3.0

We're always working hard on making Odin the best it can be, and 3.0 aims to do just that.

Optimizations
Through the careful and precise application of black magic throughout the code base and many late nights spent poring over the profiler, Odin has been optimized to be faster than ever.

Converting the Project Validator to use Odin's property system
The property system that is at the core of most of what Odin does will now also be powering the Project Validator, allowing for much more flexibility when making custom validators and validation rules.

Assignment operator support for expressions
Instead of having to add extra methods to your types, you will now be able to use assignment operators with Odin's expression system.

For example, you'll be able to do something like this: 

[InlineButton("@Value = 0", Label = "Set to zero")]
public int Value;

Value and Action Resolvers
A new, easy-to-use and extendable API that makes it a breeze to add expression and member reference support to custom drawers and validators. Adding custom arguments is a core part of the system, and it will come with several built-in default values for things like the InspectorProperty or the current value. This means that, globally, almost any string-based invocation or expression used by Odin can now gain access to extra contextual information like the InspectorProperty instance to which it is attached.

Something along these lines now becomes possible: 

[CustomValueDrawer("GiveMeCallNextDrawer")]
public int Field;

public int GiveMeCallNextDrawer(Action<GUIContent> callNextDrawer)
{
    GUI.color = Color.green;
    callNextDrawer(null);
    GUI.color = Color.white;
}

Odin Modules
Odin Modules are small packages of features that can be enabled or disabled based on different conditions, either automatically or manually by the user. This allows us to add conditionally triggered support for Unity packages like DOTS, Unity.Mathematics and Unity.Addressables.

Other planned features
  • Module: ECS entity inspection support
  • Module: Unity.Matematics support
  • Property-level understanding of visibility, GUI enabled, and expanded status, that is queryable and modifiable from attribute-based callbacks and expressions.
  • Property query syntax in expressions to easily get the property instance of a given member/value. This has a very high synergy with the above bullet point.
  • Enterprise feature: Searchable attribute
  • Enterprise feature: Required by default

The future of Unity and Odin

UI Elements
With the release of Odin Inspector 2.1, we will now be working actively on a UIElement integration for Odin. Odin’s property and drawer system is already a good fit for UI Elements on a technical level, as the principles are very similar. As time moves on we'll likely be utilizing UIElements for many things. However, a lot of Odin's drawers will continute to use IMGUI for the time being, and the transition will likely be very gradual in nature.

Unitys Entity Component System
Unity’s ECS is still in its early stages, but we already have a working Odin Inspector integration, so when the ECS API becomes a little more settled, it won't take us long to let you use Odin Inspector for your ECS data.

Unity’s New Editor Redesign
When Unity releases their final editor design overhaul, we’ll be doing a complete overhaul of Odin, we imagine that Odin will likewise transition into a completely different look from how it does now, to match the new style. We’ll still need to support the old design, and for this, we’re currently discussing various ways for us to implement a styling system that not only adds toggleable support for the new editor design, but also gives more customisation options to the user and makes drawer creation even more powerful.

At the end of 2019 we have addressed a number of the issues introduced by the editor redesign, but this is still an ongoing process.

Unity for small things
We don’t really know much at this point, but as soon as we get our hands on a version, we’ll be on it to ensure that Odin works here as well. It will likely be very similar to their ECS inspector system, so Odin should also be very easy to integrate here once Unity for small things becomes public and the API settles down.

Nested Prefabs
All attributes and editor utilities will always work in nested prefabs, basic nested prefab compatibility is done and currently in release, and you can always use the Odin Serializer to manually serialize individual fields. However, Odin serialized data in Odin's SerializedMonoBehaviour does not yet support nesting of Odin-serialized prefab modifications beyond one layer of nesting, and a warning is currently shown over disabled GUI for nested Odin-serialized prefab values - IE, at any time where several layers of Odin-serialized modifications might be applied. This is not an easy problem to solve, and it is possible that there is no feasible solution. We are working on bringing full nested prefab support to Odin, but we consider this a long-term project with uncertain timelines.

Odin Inspector Roadmap

Generated AOT serialization formatters
Odin currently relies on reflection to serialize and deserialize data on AOT platforms, thereby losing the speed boost gained by emitting custom formatter code on demand on non-AOT platforms where a JIT is available. This feature would allow AOT platforms to gain a similar boost by automatically pre-generating custom formatters into the AOT support dll at project build time. Given Unity's continuing focus on IL2CPP and AOT compilation, Odin has since its release moved steadily towards rock-solid AOT platform serialization support, and this is the final step on that journey.

Much of the work has been done already, and the code hooks for this already exist in the AOT support generation pipeline. The bulk of the remaining work lies in generating custom formatter IL in a manner sufficiently similar to the C# compiler that IL2CPP will be able to parse it into C++ code.

Type Designer - Drag and drop, code-free editor customization
This feature will not only let you to have zero code-dependencies to Odin Inspector, but it will also enable non-programmers to fully customize the editor experience and make it even easier to add support for third-party tools. It’ll also give you a far better overview of what’s possible in Odin. For instance, if you select a float field and click “add attribute”, then the Range Attribute will be included in the dropdown list, but the TextArea attribute wont, since that doesn’t work with floats.

There’s no ETA on this feature yet, but it has a high priority for us, as we see this as the next big thing for Odin Inspector, and we expect it to be the main way customizing your editors in the future. We’ll of course make sure that you have full control over how and where the editor data is saved.

Odin redistributables
For Odin to be usable in other assets released on the Asset Store, for both for ourselves and others, there are - apart from finding a good and fair financial model - a couple of technical problems to solve. We’ll need to make a tool that can take a build of the existing version of Odin, and from it generate a redistributable build that only works for a given asset. It will also do things like rename all namespaces to your decided namespace to avoid naming conflicts with other installed Odin versions.

Attributes for providing editors in the Unity Scene View
Using attributes to customize the scene view or hook into OnSceneGUI is an oft-requested feature, and one that we're looking into with great interest, as there are many extremely exciting possibilities here.