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Introducing RiderFlow, a Free Unity Editor Plugin for Scene Management
A couple of weeks ago, at GDC, we got a great reaction showing people RiderFlow, a new Unity editor plugin for scene management, navigation and searching your Unity assets.
Today, we’re pleased to announce that RiderFlow is generally available to everyone, and can be downloaded from the Asset Store, JetBrains website, or installed as a UPM package.
So what is RiderFlow? It’s a Unity editor plugin we’ve built based on the work we’ve done supporting Unity in Rider, our C#/C++ gamedev IDE. It has some very cool features that can help all members of the team work with Unity scenes. And best of all? It’s completely free!
Check out this short video for more details:
Getting Started
Adding RiderFlow to your project is very easy. The best method is to use our UPM server, and let Unity’s Package Manager install and manage the files. You’ll need to add our UPM server to your project settings, but the steps are easy and documented on the help page.
Alternatively, you can find RiderFlow on the Asset Store, or download it from our website and drop it onto the Project view to manually import it.
Why make RiderFlow?
At first glance, it might seem that RiderFlow is a surprising move for JetBrains. Why build a plugin to the Unity editor? But it’s not so strange – we makes developer tools.
Everything we build is designed to make a developer more productive. This can be with editors and IDEs like Rider, with great support for C# and a fantastic reputation amongst Unity developers for first class Unity support, such as showing code usage in assets (and with Rider 2022.1 we’re including Unreal and C++ support, too!) It’s also with team tools, like TeamCity for continuous integration, or Space for chat, project management, issue tracking, source control and more.
RiderFlow continues in that tradition – a tool designed to bring JetBrains style productivity improvements to Unity developers, and importantly, not just coders, but game designers, artists, level designers, and all members of a Unity creative team.
We’ve created a plugin for the Unity editor that takes what we’ve learnt and built in Rider for Unity and applies it to the Unity editor. It introduces a number of features that work together to make you more productive in the editor – manage complex scenes, move around with ease, find the assets you need, replace placeholder objects and more.
The Search Everywhere popup is available with a keyboard shortcut and can find assets, files, and game objects in the Hierarchy view. Clicking the results will highlight or navigate to the object or asset. You can also search for menu actions and settings items, making it really easy to invoke menus such as creating a new object, or opening the Package Manager.
We want to help you manage complex scenes by grouping objects in the Hierarchy view into colourful sections and adding notes and todos to objects that you can share with your team.
The Hierarchy view also allows you to bookmark important or work in progress objects, and you can navigate to these objects from the new floating toolbar in the Scene view (if you don’t see it on more recent Unity versions, look in the “more” menu for Overlays). You can also save camera presets, so it’s now really easy to move around your scene, jumping between objects and views with a speedy keyboard shortcut.
Let’s improve the workflow for working with objects. The Scene view toolbar has a search palette, which can find assets and prefabs to drag and drop into the scene. Pin it open for easy access while you add as many assets as you want. Once you’ve finished white boxing your scene, right click on one or more objects and select Replace Objects. RiderFlow will replace the existing placeholder objects with the proper assets, with the same location, scale and rotation.
Want to know where an asset is used? Right click and select Find Usages, or use the Show Usages in Scene action to highlight the assets directly in the scene view, greying out the rest of the scene, and use the toolbar to switch between different instances.
And finally, we understand that sometimes you just need to make a quick change to a script, and you don’t want to bother opening the external script editor, even one as good as Rider. In Unity, right click the script asset and select Edit Code, and RiderFlow will open a fully integrated code editor, directly in Unity. It’s powered by Rider, but simpler – perfect for small changes and quick fixes.
RiderFlow is a great tool for your Unity editor utility tool belt. Good quality of life features designed to make you more productive in the Unity editor, spending less time hunting for objects or assets or resetting scene views, and more time understanding your scene and improving your game. There’s lots more details on the home page, and in the help. Add it to your project, either from the Asset Store, or via UPM, and let us know how you get on!
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