Unity Helpers Roadmap

This roadmap outlines planned enhancements to Unity Helpers. All “Currently shipping” features are production-ready and available now. See the main README for current capabilities.

1. Comprehensive Inspector Tooling

Currently shipping: Attribute and property drawer suite covering enum toggles, dropdowns, conditional display, grouping, buttons, and validation. Key attributes: WEnumToggleButtons, WShowIf, WValueDropDown, WGroup, WButton, WNotNull, ValidateAssignment.

Next up:

• Odin Inspector migration tooling
• Investigate color themes (had a version of this for WGroup, had to scrap it due to complexity)
• Tabbed/section navigation with persistent layout bookmarks
• Visual instrumentation (progress bars, warning badges, inline state telemetry)
• Additional attributes, serializable types

2. Expanded Editor Tooling

Currently shipping: Animation Creator, Sprite Sheet Animation Creator, Animation Event Editor, plus 20+ sprite/texture/prefab utilities. See Editor Tools Guide for full list.

Next up:

• Animation Creator enhancements
• Sprite Sheet Animation Creator enhancements
• Animation Event Editor refinements
• Additional automation surfaces

3. Advanced Random & Statistical Testing

Currently shipping: 15+ high-quality RNG implementations (IllusionFlow, PcgRandom, XoroShiro, SplitMix64, RomuDuo, FlurryBurst, PhotonSpin, etc.) with extensive IRandom API. See Random Performance.

Next up:

• CI-friendly statistical harness: PractRand/TestU01 suites with automated pass/fail artifacts
• Automated quality reports: histograms, percentile deltas, change detection for PR gates
• Higher-level sampling: Poisson disk, stratified sampling, correlated noise, shuffled streams, deterministic scenario builders
• Investigation of Job/Burst-aware stream schedulers: seed pools, jump-ahead APIs, reservoir/permutation helpers with property-based tests

4. Enhanced Spatial Trees

Currently shipping: Production 2D trees (QuadTree2D, KdTree2D, RTree2D, SpatialHash2D) and experimental 3D variants (OctTree3D, KdTree3D, RTree3D, SpatialHash3D). See 2D Performance and 3D Performance.

Next up:

• Graduate 3D trees to production: profiling data, comprehensive docs, parity with 2D APIs
• Mutable/incremental updates/variants: localized inserts/removals without full rebuilds
• Unity Physics parity: ray/capsule/sphere casts, overlap tests, PhysicsScene adapter structs
• Investigate streaming builders: tile-based loading for large worlds, job-based construction

5. UI Toolkit Enhancements

Currently shipping: LayeredImage and MultiFileSelectorElement custom visual elements with samples and persistence helpers.

Next up:

• Control pack: dockable panes, inspector tab bars, data tables, curve editors, virtualized multi-column lists
• Theme/palette system: USS/UXML snippets with runtime/editor parity samples
• Performance patterns: batched bindings, incremental painters, list virtualization utilities with comprehensive docs
• Automation dashboards: UI Toolkit-based wizards for workflow automation

6. Utility Expansion

Currently shipping: Extensive utilities covering pooling (Buffers, array pools), singleton patterns, animation helpers, sprite utilities, compression, math extensions, and more. See Helper Utilities.

Next up:

• Cross-system bridges: effects ↔ serialization, pooling ↔ DI containers, random ↔ spatial query fuzzers with ready-made samples
• Math/combinatorics helpers: curve fitting, statistics, interpolation packs, IO/localization conveniences
• Service patterns: task/tween schedulers, async job orchestrators, gameplay timers with integrated diagnostics

7. Performance Program

Currently shipping: Comprehensive benchmarks for random generators, spatial trees, reflection helpers, and IList sorting. See Random Performance, Spatial Tree Performance, and Reflection Performance.

Next up:

• Automated benchmark harness: CI integration, baseline storage, regression detection per subsystem
• Investigate burst/Jobs optimizations: hot loop rewrites for spatial queries, pooling, math helpers with analyzer hints
• Allocation/GC audits: Roslyn analyzers and NUnit tests enforcing zero-allocation guarantees for critical APIs
• Safety analyzers: custom Roslyn rule that flags SerializableNullable<T>.Value access without a preceding HasValue check (Unity asmdef-friendly package)

8. Attribute & Tag System Evolution

Currently shipping: Data-driven effects system with attributes, tags, effect stacks, and metadata caches. ScriptableObject-driven effect authoring with cosmetics and duration management. See Effects System.

Next up:

• Effect visualization: inspector timeline for active effects, stack inspection, debug overlays
• Attribute graphs: dependency tracking with automatic recalculation when modifiers change
• Migration tools: schema evolution helpers for effects and attribute definitions

9. Relational Component Enhancements

Currently shipping: Component auto-wiring attributes (SiblingComponent, ParentComponent, ChildComponent) with DI integrations for VContainer, Zenject, and Reflex. See Relational Components.

Next up:

• Performance improvements: cached reflection paths, Roslyn source generators for zero-reflection wiring
• Enhanced validation: editor-time dependency visualization, hierarchy relationship graphs
• Advanced querying: interface-based resolution, filtered component searches