Untold Editor — Redesigned Workflow, POM Materials, and Editor Improvements #1166
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A new version of the Untold Engine Studio is now available, featuring a major redesign of the editor experience alongside new material workflows, viewport improvements, and a collection of fixes across scene and asset management.
A Redesigned Editor Experience
The biggest change in this release is a substantial overhaul of the editor interface.
The editor now uses a more consistent dark visual language, with a unified theme across the Scene Graph, Inspector, Assets, Console, Environment, and Effects panels. Hardcoded UI colors have been replaced with a semantic editor color system, giving the interface a more cohesive appearance and making future UI work easier to maintain.
The previous top toolbar has also been replaced by a native macOS menu system, providing familiar File and View menus alongside standard keyboard shortcuts for creating, opening, and saving projects and scenes.
The overall workspace is now more flexible. The left, bottom, and right panels can be independently hidden with ⌘1, ⌘2, and ⌘3, while ⌘F enters a Focus Viewport mode that temporarily hides all panels and restores the previous layout when toggled again.
Project and Scene Workflow
The Scene Graph has been redesigned around a clearer hierarchy:
Project → Scenes → Elements
Projects now act as the top-level workspace, with scenes discovered directly from the project's
Scenes/directory. Multiple scenes can be listed in the project while the currently active scene expands to expose its live ECS elements.Selecting a project, scene, or entity also changes what appears in the right panel:
This makes the editor contextual rather than requiring users to manually switch between several inspector tabs.
Creating a new scene now resets the world to a fresh scene, while loading another scene replaces the active world after confirmation. The scene catalog automatically refreshes as scenes are saved and loaded.
Finder-Style Asset Browser
The Assets panel has been redesigned around a more familiar Finder-style workflow.
A directory tree now appears on the left, with the contents of the selected folder displayed on the right. Imports are performed through contextual menus and automatically target the currently selected directory.
Asset search has also been moved into the shared Assets/Console bar, reducing UI clutter while giving both views a consistent workflow.
Material authoring has received additional improvements as well. Texture sets can now be automatically assigned from Asset Browser folders, making it much faster to connect a full set of PBR textures instead of assigning every map individually.
Hovering over materials in the Inspector now exposes texture information inline, making it easier to verify material assignments without opening every texture slot.
Height Maps and Parallax Occlusion Mapping
The editor now exposes the Height/POM material channel introduced by Untold Engine 0.18.0.
Height maps can be assigned directly through the Inspector, along with controls for configuring Parallax Occlusion Mapping parameters. This brings the complete POM workflow into the editor and removes the need to manually modify material files when adding surface depth.
This is particularly useful for materials such as brick, stone, tile, flooring, and other surfaces where additional geometric detail can be approximated without increasing mesh complexity.
Viewport and Gizmo Improvements
Viewport interaction received several fixes and refinements.
The Move, Rotate, and Scale controls now live at the top-center of the viewport with clearer active-state feedback. Gizmo drag updates are also coalesced during transforms, reducing redundant updates and producing smoother manipulation while moving, rotating, or scaling objects.
Several selection and lighting issues were fixed as part of this work, including parent-child selection in the viewport, directional-light gizmo rotation, and tracking of the active directional light.
Performance and Editor Responsiveness
The editor now pauses rendering during panel animations and live window resizing, avoiding unnecessary rendering work while the workspace is being rearranged.
Scene hierarchy updates after asynchronous asset loading have also been improved. Instead of relying on polling, the editor now detects when asynchronous loading finishes and refreshes the hierarchy accordingly. This is especially useful for streamed and tiled assets that may appear after the initial scene load.
Scene and Asset Fixes
Several workflow regressions were addressed in this release:
The release also includes an updated license, lint and CI fixes, expanded test coverage, and the move to Untold Engine 0.18.0.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The redesigned native menu introduces a consistent set of shortcuts:
Undo and redo continue to be handled by the editor's existing undo manager.
Moving Toward a Better Spatial Development Workflow
This release is primarily about making the Untold Editor feel less like a collection of development tools and more like a cohesive environment for building scenes with Untold Engine.
The redesigned project and scene hierarchy, contextual Inspector, Finder-style asset workflow, native macOS menus, improved material authoring, and new POM controls all reduce the amount of friction involved in taking assets from creation to a running Untold Engine scene.
There is still plenty of work ahead, but this release establishes a much stronger foundation for the editor as Untold Engine's tooling and rendering capabilities continue to grow.
A special thanks to the MioLabs team for their contributions to the redesigned editor experience.
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